Men are Weeping Everywhere

Stupid! says the boy 

thrashing the hedge with a stick. 

Stupid! Thwack. Stupid! Thwack. 

He can’t see what he’s hitting 

for the tears, but my father senses 

something out there shaking. 

* 

For our bodies’ work, we need good feeding,

need god masks and clothes for decency. Sea

of skeleton beneath, echoing sounds like

songbirds long on zest and short on sleep. 

* 

Alone in a woodshed. 

Ax head buried 

in the stump 

that won’t part. 

A man sits 

on a mound of wood chips, 

his face pools in his hands. 

* 

The body knows so much more than 

function alone, more than reaction. It’s the

intricate mangroves of our civilised minds—

belts of fine wood chips and candor, 

mass of thought-sand shimmering among

the seashells—setting down their roots

well below the conscious line. 

* 

On the bus. Soundless. 

In an old herringbone coat. 

Two rivers carve 

his stoney face.

* 

We’d walked for six million years, bowed from the

loneliest distance of darkness and become defenders,

builders, steep hunters who couldn’t give up fear,

who drank a good cup and even learned how to weep

silently at night, fleshing herrings’ bones. 

* 

My father sinks to the ground 

over where he buried the dog. 

He strikes his wet cheeks, curses. 

Finds himself laughing, then licks 

salt crusts like dark chocolate bits. 

* 

Our faces show we’re curious, 

always wary, as when we stayed 

put in the trees for so long, 

before feet touched browned 

earth, eyes cocked this way and that, 

trick the leopard’s wild claws, make 

a hot run for the shallow pond 

to sink into a gulp. 

One ex-love said: Men weep 

through their cocks. 

How did we come to see beauty, 

and did it pitch its first chance 

in our groins or in our heads? 

Who was called to be the love-guest, 

niched in the pillowing leaves 

among high-terraced branches and heat?

And before Australopithecus, making no plans, 

just radiating purpose from need, survival. 

* 

The unwatched man cries. The man who’s not sure he’s a man cries. The woman who wants to be a man cries out. The cries of the gulls over the fisherman are answered by his knife as he shreds the net so it’ll never be mended and yells as he weeps. The man on the boat cries. The one in the water cries. I don’t know what you want of me—cries the man who was my grandfather into the lap of the woman who was my grandmother—honestly, I don’t know. (I was just about to knock, face flushed, tears answering his.) The student cries alone in the carol, while janitors empty bins. Failure hangs over him like a sword. The man headed into battle cries. And the one returning. Under night’s blanket I survey my life. Like a rear view mirror’s multi-car clash I somehow managed to squeak by. All my faults are there. All the screw ups that could’ve killed me. I kneel in the backyard and cry out at the moon, sliced in half like a magician’s trick. Cry over our lost child. Cry because I’m grateful for all I’ve come through. 

* 

Strides unbroken, we needed clans guarding our weak 

enclosures, shielding lover and self, soft newborns. 

Spread our tangle of vines and diligent calls. Fed on 

nuts, greens, fruit, and chased down other trees for more, 

until others like us claimed territories, spread their nets. 

Early behaviors flooding ancestral bodies. 

* 

The man on the park bench 

is haloed by an empty space, 

as if no passerby dared 

interrupt the sobbing. 

When one does 

they lean hard on each other, 

both shaking. Paired bowling balls 

being air dried. 

* 

Grief, pain, and palm-clenching, wounds that 

made us pound the first poultices, fevers asking

for desperate balms. We gave our bodies up for

the right herbal clues, learned to stay away from poor

choices, fatal poisons. Held each other in death,

found fire from our own hands, longed for good heat. 

* 

In the calculus of longing 

the crying man 

counts as < one. 

* 

Men wept, gave weakness back to riled-up animals

in flight, pulled the covers off on hunters’ guile.

How’s it out there? the great tumuli ask, holding

tide-washed heaps of male dominance & power— 

time-worn, crushed, fragmented. Found knees bent. 

* 

You wouldn’t know my father 

was crying, save for the earthquake 

quivering every inch of him. 

And the wet falling on his dress shoes, 

as if prepped for spit-polishing. 

* 

What would I have given to see my father weep,

lay aside his mask and gambled reef, ancient pride 

whipped back, baring his scars like the femora of

Orrorin tugenensis bares. What god-wind swept 

away his long futile cry which I did not hear? Men

have not wept enough, won’t be seen dead in tears. 

* 

I covet movies, just so I can have a reason

to let go without undue questioning. 

*

Weep when delicateness least expects it. Trembling

bodies shed tight wavelengths of isolation, angst. 

That’s when tears prevail over grit. World people, the

hunted turned hunter cried. Now we let go. 

* 

Balloons well up 

under animé eyes. 

They quiver, before 

gushing out, 

raining down, 

flooding the whole town. 

* 

In the calculus of longing, 

primates rings with 

a tenderer feeling, and 

I imagine a time when 

we first made art, love— 

with lattices of need, 

seaweeds of desire, 

curiosity, and failure, too. 

Partners tearing up— 

* 

The cricket loss dissolves 

the fist of men 

into tears. 

* 

How did we turn from survival’s 

hunts in open fields to swift games 

that warmed us in caves, 

that made us laugh when we won, 

get bent when we didn’t? 

Which hominids found tears more healing, made safe ripples & burials in peat bogs?

* 

One man holds onto 

the overhead loop on the subway 

while he backhands his eyes 

with the other arm’s sleeve. 

Everyone’s so goddamn studious 

all of a sudden, eyes blued by 

phones, fingers blackened by news. 

* 

I wish for stories of Denisovans’ loneliness, see

lives 2.5 million years in a great span of time,

visualise our early human ancestors in the Upper

Paleolithic, facing hunger and regret while

walking in search of food—the weather,

sharp-stone-brutal, and grief glinting as pearls. 

* 

Men weep everywhere. 

They can hardly see to steer. 

* 

My good ancestors move untethered, 

nodules of the past with sights ahead. I gather balms for wounds, for fevers which water gives us. I sense danger 

lurking nearby and will be the first 

to bolt; better that I go than weary 

women and children, gladiolas sniffed up by wolves who hear the weeping, 

who understand our fear. 

* 

Each of us. All day. 

Behind our glasses. 

Behind locked bathroom door stalls. 

Alone in our cars. 

All us men,

or semblances of them, 

weeping. 

We don’t know how 

we’ll ever stop. 

Don’t know if we even want to. 

* 

Our bodies carry us across painted time, 

needing care when weakened, harmed. 

I’m living in pieces, Ardipithecus 

ramidus leaping from clay. She taught us 

how to live, weep for life. 4.4 million years 

is a long time to learn something. 

* 

If we listen with our whole bodies, 

inside suffering there’s music, 

solace of storm song’s balm. 

A man, with another man 

in his arms.