The Poetics of Manhood
You think about attraction and guilt alternately, a pair of ravenous vultures swooping in from opposite skies to arm wrestle on the pyre of your innocence. You think about the time in high school when you felt a flood of fire shatter the metal orchard in your lower body when you met attraction unwittingly in your English tuitions. You were grateful that you were wearing jeans. Through teenage, masculinity seemed quixotic. A bright sun in an already humid sky. Its heat dissipating directionless like a fable lost under a pile of countless human bodies lying dead from their quest for touch. And when you rode your scooter at twenty on an empty road, you saw a friend move past like lightning and sound like thunder when he screamed – Are you riding a bullock cart? Be a man, dude. So you drove faster to feel manhood limn your rib cage with threads of gold. And you reminisced this implored acceleration, the shaking of the scooter each time you wrote M for Male while filling examination forms in your youth wondering why they didn’t offer an option H for Human. Just to be sure. Male was reduced to a figure of speech. And gender – a crown for your guts, too heavy to be a part of your whole and yet sitting in you like petulant roots in soft earth. You figured in the cacophony of hormones that there is no tender way to be tender. And now when endearing mentions of your nickname turn into muffled sobs heard from a washroom in ruins – all in the constant baritone of your septuagenarian father, you feel a high tide crash against the gusto of your Adam’s apple like something is about to give. And it is caged masculinity that evaporates first from the sheath of your clavicles. You lose a few pounds, gain some years and instantly see the whole wide world around you – men and women, their thighs and hips disintegrating atom by atom into starry dust. Only faces and voices floating along latching on to planks of conversation. And carnal knowledge now rendered useless, they are struggling to find ways to show affection.
Satya Dash’s recent poems have been published or are forthcoming in Passages North, Prelude, The Florida Review, and Porridge. He has been a cricket commentator, dabbled with short fiction and has a degree in electronics from BITS Goa. He lives in Bangalore, India and recites his poetry in the city’s cafes. Twitter Handle – https://twitter.com/satya043
Photo Credit: Jordan Runyan, New Mexico Review Staff