Sputterpub's Blog

Our family is blessed with many boys.
We’d love some girls but none of us would trade
in brothers, sons or fathers. We have noise
and burps and farting jokes, and mischief played
amid the strongest hugs that arms can give.
Their hearts are warm – their sweetness male but known.
I understand their gender, for I live
with characters who make testosterone.

Respecting their equipment and their yen,
we rear them to be courteous. We mind
their masculinity, from boys to men.
Their penises are perfectly designed,
but other parts prevail. We have no guys
who’d force a kiss or shock a woman’s eyes.

Of course I knew him. We were intimate
young lovers all through college. We revealed
ourselves to one another, tried to fit
the romance in our visions. Neither kneeled,
but we embraced. We might have made a go
of us, except his mother’s suicide
derailed him, caused a pause and cast him low.
I couldn’t flourish at the pace we tried.

Achieving friendship as the decades flowed,
we stayed in touch. He visited at times.
We furthered our acquaintance. Now I know
his family was poor compared to mine,
his parents flaky, and himself devout.
The love I thought I understood I doubt.

She doesn’t recollect herself that well.
I met her at 18 and we’ve been close,
but she denies her past. I sometimes tell
her what she said or did, or how she chose
her course, but she’ll debate – she doesn’t feel
as if it went that way. She won’t review
the letters she composed; they’ve no appeal –
she says she isn’t interested in true
as much as in what’s possible right now.

But if today’s a product of the past,
a present made of yesterdays, then how
can we assay ourselves without a cast
back-lit? She doesn’t crave the facts I seek,
but she forgets the things she said last week.

I travel with anxiety. I go,
I revel in sensation and aspect,
but I’m away from home, my stuff – I grow
impatient for my comforts. I’m half-wrecked,
off-base but fascinated with the scene.
I watch a culture, learn a tendency
outside my own. The stimulation’s keen –
immersion in new anthropology.

And lately, though the distance isn’t far,
I twice a week live elsewhere than my place.
I cross the bay to where some offspring are,
and witness them in awkwardness and grace.
I love the exercise, but I confess
it makes a mood resembling travel stress.

I’ve always been an anarchist of sorts:
I’d like to modulate the role of laws,
and settle all disputes outside the courts
without a thread of violence, because
I think our species capable of fair
behavior, moral compass, empathy.
Self-confidence requires us to square
our logic. Reason is our specialty.

So I’ve imagined superseding rules;
I’ve wondered if we should eliminate
positions, regulations – all the tools
preserving the administrative state.
I’m sorry, but I fear my strategy
would look like what we’re seeing in D.C.

I’ve been an anxious personality
as long as I remember. Was I born
with it, or did I drink Mom’s tendency
along with infant formula? I’ve sworn
it off ten thousand times, but then I tense
my neck and jaw until the pains remind
my ways. The agitation makes no sense,
but maybe I was formed to be this kind.

I used to think environment meant more
than most genetic traits, but that was wrong.
I vowed to fairly raise the kids I bore,
but learned that they came fully baked; along
with helplessness they signaled how they were,
so maybe for this me, there is no cure.