poem of the moment #4

I knew you
before we both knew ourselves.
before your wounds had healed,
when your blood, true and strong,
flowed from your veins just as
thickly as it now pumps to the surface of your skin.
we were both more honest then.
tossed dignity aside,
too overwhelmed by love and life and
hormones
to conceal our soft bellies (fat with mother's milk).

and yet still we hid
from
sneering peers
strangers' gropes
fathers' arms
from
loving ourselves.

Then, then, I knew you.
And loved you for reflecting me,
whom i could not.
and for, within, the You i saw.

Loved you for the moth, wet and curled, wrapped within the
delicate protection
of
concentrated resolve.

I see you've got a wing out now, and a leg or two.



Good.

Me too.

So I'll know You, too, when we both emerge,
triumphant in birth and ready
to flutter,
and
depart.

Poem of the moment #3

Folding laundry and suddenly
a small doesn't seem quite so.
a shirt filled out, no longer draped loose on
soft shoulders, thin ribs.
chinks in the armor i put up to pretend i'm the same,
that i could have been happy before,
that it's No Big Deal, i can Handle it;
my excessive artificing foiled by a skin of cotton
spilling volumes of what lies beneath.

Thought of the Day

"Making everyone else wrong is easy; understanding difference as complimentary rather than oppositional seems to be a much more difficult project." -Jamison Green

taken from the article "Part of the Package" in the Journal Men and Masculinities,January 2005.

This is something I could go on about for days, and I have (in my own head). But I hadn't been able to articulate it so cleanly as Green does here. I encourage you to stop and reflect on it in the context of your own lives, and in the context of mine.