Men begin to separate from the boys only as the sticks starts serpententing. And as the politics gets weird conversations deepen and we staggerate less and less in our misguided confidence. It is here we properly study the female anatomy and write our goals with charred sticks in sand. The time is nigh boys, let’s all go deeper.
A healthy midpoint is reached somewhere in the deep jungles between John Cena and Noam Chomsky. We manscape while reading bell hooks. We drink kale in stained wife beaters while playing go. Y’all get the point. The moon is in its waning phase for patriarchal idolization and we are all here for the big show.
Matio rolls up to me on the beach with his crescent bike. Tells me he smelled my weed and that the pyre was going up in flames at ten. Happens every Friday he said. This place lives here as well as there. In between gentle and wild, where roaring rivers meet and is for one spectacular moment none of which it was before but merely scum. I tell Matio I will be there and he asks my name again, repeats it as he fades back into the dark chain rattling foliage.
At ten I learn it takes three men to light a bonfire. One to gather the wood, one to strike the match, and one to supervise. These men live in all of us. Yet we often mistake the latter to have done all the work. These men meet in love and humility. I also learned that a fire always collapses in four stages. One being physical, the other three elemental but that is a whole different poem all together.
Matio finds me and we are engulfed. I try to make up a word for it but can, for once, not escape the moment at hand. For in this moment we are more than scum, more than fire, more than men, and brave enough to see ourselves and our common desires for what they truly are. In the grand scheme of things, insignificant and perhaps even trivial. The bonfire consumes all and none of us are in control. Of anything. And that is all that really is.
- Afton Light, 2021
Commentaires