'Angel and the Badman'

Men like to whip
Their hands out and scrunch up
Their faces nice and tight when they want
To get into it. An I’m always trying to get
Into it and get out of it at the same goddamn time.
Like, can you break a bottle and sling the jagged
End near some dudes face and also call it love?
Then I could write sonnets with slurs and wild
Heat. Lord, I’m tired of vigorous masculinity
Pumping up the street and into veins. I know we
Could bust our lips fat and bloody with memories alone.
You know, John Wayne’s always walking around
Killing savages and talking monosyllabically to me.
Like the patron saint of ‘buck the fuck up’ partner
And get along. Because of course, when my dad
Was 8 nuns told him that John Wayne was
The “model man”. An now we pray to him for
Wisdom, and grit, and how to wear a dumbass
Cowboy hat. But I’m still afraid of looking like
A coward in the grocery store, or sidewalk,
So I scrunch up my face like a wrinkled car hood
And march like a fuckboi in between coffee shops.
Because men learn to penetrate themselves with
Fiction. Men learn to damn up the rivers of their
Bodies until the banks run out and flood the streets.
So all I’m hearing is this sweet guiding light of
Second hand sermon telling of my uncle splitting
Some cop in the side of the skull, “crack” with his forearm
And sprinting off in the wild heat of night.

https://www.reddit.com/r/poetry_critics/comments/8lx5is/the_island/
https://www.reddit.com/r/poetry_critics/comments/8m2nfu/pub_neons/