Note to the New Feminist Protocols - 2018

If men are expected to up our games in the nuance of flirtation,

Knowing our entire reputations can be destroyed for an incorrect calculation,

And yes this power exists and men fear it whether you have no intention of misusing it.

We can trust your discretion all we want, nevertheless this threat exists.

And yes we fear this whether you want us to or not.

And yes we will not approach some of you or

Not speak up in certain situations where we may have in the past where you wish we would,

But we will be by nature more selective in this paradigm,

Because yes some women do attempt and accomplish ruining men’s lives with this power.

So in exchange for this respectful caution,

Please consider applying a reciprocal calculation

When you choose to break up with men in the ghosting department.

When you ghost us,

On some level, whether you wish to apply this or not,

It indicates an implicit indictment or our incapability to handle a face to face declination

Or cessation of the dating experience.

Aside from the normal discourtesy,

It is a measure of assignment that a man is closer to the cannot be trusted

With not turning into an abusive character

Or is somehow emotionless in heartache to the end of the relationship in part because of his masculinity.

If women expect men to heighten emotional intelligence,

Male responsibility must coincide with female trust

For the masculine to carry emotional weight including the witnessing by females of his pain.

Do not treat our hearts like mechanic contraptions for we are not.

That is all. 

Stagger Tongue - 20180107

Startle haze spyglass doorway

Coffee shop and I do not drink coffee

Alcove on the left I see you motion

Invitation to approach

In staggered tongue I admit sometimes

It takes me a minute, the stimulus the buzz of it all

Gets to be too much

Two cups of jasmine tea and you ask me

About being an introvert

I mutter about an amygdala

Comfort quilt brown eyes

In the corner of tea jars and a box of lost umbrellas

I found you

In a New York sweater in my New Orleans

There is an observant part of you

That flushed me with permission to be

That is to say, a man who has been taught to hide

Who has long talked to the empty pillow

As if somewhere you were out there in first acquaintance cliché

Nine years of mine and six years and four months in age

Wondering why this flight south
Shaken snow feathered goose down

For a one-bedroom apartment cheap rent and fifteen houseplants

AmeriCorps let you decide where to help

Memories of a father’s Jazz Fest pilgrimage

With music in bold lungs

Zest for clarinet and piano and his second daughter songbird

Here in black and white cloth, blond curls

Tidy stature, bibliophile, brilliant teeth  

Help me remember my own in the whispers

Cured spice bustle of background mocha aficionado chatter

Middle of three sisters for the middle of three brothers

Choir singer like my mother

Father held family round table talks on Sundays

A man with four females

Daughters and fathers

Dating remembering the dead and the abusive

A morsel in me appreciates you have him

Knowing the injury of when a woman no longer can look at a man

My thirteen-year-old daughter

Model for how a man should treat her

Your father cried watching Cadillac Records

Beyoncé playing Etta James singing At Last

I think he must think of you at the microphone 

Younger sister Paul Simon shoes in Connecticut

Older sister pencil skirt big-job married to the Dane in Chicago

Younger brother coffee-fiend / record label marketer

Older brother tattoo artist married to the Canadian in Ontario

Mother paints and you shyly describing your father’s boating

Without saying the word yacht

As if the gilded tinge of something to create distance and yet love

About who you are and how close and sliver of trepidation

Mixed in how others have seen kin intimacy

As threatening in the frivolity catalyst quintet

Of those Sunday shared secrets of where is privacy in bond

Ferried truths of Carnival’s beginning

The bone gang drumming around America’s Jackson Square

A place of memory 1999 New Year’s millennium

On the steps of St. Louis cathedral

Crows on a wire outside your apartment

Recollect an epilogue unanswered of a woman in a crowd

At the pinch of sunset, you exit the door

Hair blown out, straightened, those brown eyes in mascara

Effort offered

I struggle to find the unstartled aperture to compliment you

Until candlelight at a table in the Bywater

Admitting the overanalytical too often bests the obvious

Jazz on the radio, lips moist in delicious patter

Closed eyes welcoming, hum infused animal exhalations

Palm on nape

Deliberate desire

Collusion of bodies in passionate embankment

With a woman prone to buckle her seatbelt

Knowing she is about to be kissed

I become chaos

Love is not an ordered being

Flood of the tempered

Under streetlights of my new favorite restaurant for its spectacular parking lot

Remembering a mariner weary of sirens promising to gnash

The steeple women, the burlesque scorpions, the kundalini yoginis

A mermaid I have yet hear sing

Tale in a barstool of a twelve-year-old boy waiting for his grandmother

Who you help find the confidence to be heard as a person 

Walk out of the bar of cat theater and erotic poetry

Toward a school like the crow on the wire

Spots we have passed so many times before

Innocuous and yet we jolt

Henceforth those places bear gravity inextricably infused in memory

Of how a person does not plan such intersections

Life startles us stagger-tongued

Such beautiful collisions 

The Ghost in the Sensorimotor Loop

That horrible self-baited feeling in limbo waiting to be declined.

The other’s silence like a timer-less bomb

At some point of pride one surrenders the count to keep on counting

As one departs the blast radius

There is no email, text, or fossil-era phone call coming

One has been ghosted into the phantasm of rejection

Once more commemorated in the tree rings of self-doubt

Comprising one’s spinal column

The junior proms and university quads

The eighth-grade movie theaters and marital living rooms

The scenes of assassinations in face of extermination

Blurred into the get-out, the silent spook

The you are not wanted here in a way that is intended to be understand

And if not, you are the monster for wanting words

A parting gift of human dignity materializing what was not material

The digital proxy stand-in

The corporate computer operated answer press seven hang up

The numbers of call-on-hold time tally limitless

And then you remember the blast radius

In shrapnel of memory recollecting the sharpened guts of hope

That maybe you wanted to be seen as a human being

To share a cup for a sip and to feel that no matter the volume

It was too much to ask, that one should not expect

The slightest bit of reciprocation  

One is to let go

To be ok with the silence  

The Scarlet D

Reality show air brake

Pondering The Today Show

Skid mark not according to plan

Daily revelations of who is naughty

Approaching white man in a beard creeping down chimney time

That this media scarlet D sexual assault deluge

Is a smidgeon of catchup for generations of comfortable afterthoughts

Of no one will believe me’s in sidebar legal conversations

Of my career or this: Him or me

Weinstein or Lauer

Cosby or Ailes

Trump or Clinton

Set bald head into frame and put a wig on it

Cry devastated or nooooooooooooooo!

In social media et tu? to a me too.

Rally around a hashtag of a witch-hunt of witches hunting

Reclaiming space and letters transposing consonants

Like I’m Madonna #itch to scratch that feminist swag

For a planned parenthood mammogram denied

Wondering why is she so angry, the outburst, the gall of a nasty woman  

1973 to 2017 uterus-future struck gong

Like a human rights threshold of credence

Of “Oh now you believe me” resounding

To say if you do this you are no longer welcome to be valorized

Translation corporate sponsors no longer find it profitable

To be associated with your public image given these revelations

You are the Enron / Arthur Andersen of talk show hosts, of movie producers, of Jell-O pitchmen  

The what of discomfort of McCarthyism false accusations

The inverse of the pretense to disbelieve a female voice over a male

The irony of Hillary chastising Bill’s accusers and losing to Donald

The American ethos of electing sexual abusive presidents

Inked in Thomas Jefferson’s rapes

You say you want a revolution

Well, you know

You tell me it’s the institution

You’d better free your mind instead

Oh John too beat women and children, adulterer

Mum and Dad left him and he sang out

Gender double standards, gilded images warped in era

Judgment by the time they lived in of Caesar’s choice

Not going to reinstall Prima Noctae in grab-form

At any wedding Snatch Slapper crashes at Mar-a-largo?

Viral video’s and the noble blood of George H. Bush’s nephew laughed along

Melania, his wife at the time “said that was ok”

Every time America looks at its female figurehead of monarchy

We see the king can do as he pleases and the queen takes it

If not, she gets replaced, after all she is the replacement of the replacement

Back to the British Whig Party; Dilly Dilly! Dilly Dilly! America

Grab another drink it is playoff time

Buy her a necklace to know who she belongs on Black Friday

Buy another iPhone on CyberMonday and watch the show

Straight Outta Vagina pussy grabs back on Giving Tuesday

Don’t play stupid, don’t play dumb

Vagina’s where you’re really from

From Putin to Three-Baby-Mama fo Five Kids

We know whatcha did

As a man, I despise men like you: impudent empowered

With the sober legalities of sanctioned dominant animal praise

As if steamrolled consent is an act of magnanimity

To be lauded the way a priest lifts Sunday school fabric  

To the boardrooms to the oval office

Trembling in pot-kettle tweets

Man to man, we don’t want you

If you are married, get divorced before you flirt

If you don’t know the difference between flirting and sexual harassment

Check Kant’s categorical imperative, imagine your penis was a vagina

Imagine she was your daughter, except for you Tiny Hands Gruber  

You’re Fired is the new Go Make Me A Sandwich 

Organizations like universities, corporations, the military, and the Catholic Church 

Conceal and abet rapists to posture order of synthetic hierarchy

Aiding victims risks exposing the falsehood of ordered security

And a reduction in access to revenue. The victim becomes the threat to the brand. 

0.6% Conviction rate, 26% Arrested of which 20% Prosecuted may take years

About 20 percent of college freshman are victims of rape. 

Trauma, vulnerability, courageous rebuttal

The answer is improve police departments 

Catching repeat offenders 

Less than eight percent of men commit over ninety percent of sexual assaults 

So what as we as a society willing to do about rooms full of untested rape kits? 

Thanksgiving in Trumpland 20171123

Rural Mississippi woods, country road, parents’ retirement acre  

Thanksgiving in Trumpland

Talking internal temperature of turkeys over one-eighty

Timing two in the morning father shuffling through drawers for a meat thermometer

Three couples and me in the house

My gen-x body attempting sleep on an air mattress slid in a mezzanine attic loft

Parent bears in master, aunt and husband in guest one, older brother's family out in the trailer

Millennial brother and wife in upstairs guest two

Ask me at eleven p.m. if I want a beer after lights out, elders long asleep

Reading my kindle-light to a Chris Hedges’ book, “Empire of Illusion”

Newlyweds stay up to one a.m. streaking light out their door, chatting suds

Stay with the word tide solo rustling my cracked car accident spinal disk

Boomer father in an hour testing meat heat for Turkey Day

Roll out aluminum foil, crinkle, crinkle

Five a.m. aunt’s husband up with my dad talking retirement payouts

Lump sum or monthly payment, windows how it is and ain’t no more

How-to on payroll tax fraud; little lies, my conscience is ok; so it's not wrong 

One of the lucky few with a pension

Durkheim, guys he’s worked with since nineteen: workplace family

Live life in the money, grandkids, American dream whole oral bit

Aunt woke up and started checking plasma screen prices on her iPhone

For Black Friday, Cyber Monday perfect replacement television

She got toe-jam football, she shoot coca cola…

Millennials still sleeping 8:20 am

Old bucks hustling for coffee and grinds

Pajama morning, can you feel the disease

Aunt’s taking a Zyrtec for allergies

Got a Christmas sweater and a laminated Thanksgiving prayer for Jesus to read 

People eating cake for breakfast with John Lennon playing on the iHome

Father shows me a video of

Sean Rowe “To Leave Something Behind” on his iPhone

Says it makes him cry; I listen to it in an alcove over the relative bustle

“When the machine has taken the soul of a man”

My maternal grandfather and his senior friends arrive under the crucifix above the door 
One with a CNN cap my father asks him if he wants a replacement

I help Pa Pa piss a few drops from a stubborn prostate

Elastic band pants and joke to still laugh at our farts

Staring out glass to a rose bush harboring a honey bee

Last to the food line: dry unfrozen venison my dad killed in 2016
The cranberry sauce tastes like Play-Doh

Last seat is next to my father and the geriatric set

Silence broken between five post-Medicare citizens and me

Talk about taking my former Catholic high school principal to dinner

Mention the time the priest got drunk and he had to still say the magic words

My father switched to the public school his senior year to do a split schedule work program

Afternoon tractor ride for the disciples to chainsaw a dead log into firewood

Son put it perpendicular, do you know what I mean? No.

Fire circle pit geometric shapes for airflow and tinder

Blaze way of the ancient to sit under the stars and make up stories

About the ceiling paint, twinkle UFO’s and peach moonshine

Powers whiskey and standing in cold Mississippi night

Rascal tales and fishing shorelines receding as hair gone

How New Orleans is sinking and no chance

Father says communism was not Leftists; 

Civil War was over states’ rights, says Libertard and looks straight at me  

I wish it was the whiskey or if he knew it was Lao Tzu

"He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know."

I try to keep my mouth shut; fail, say too much.

Tribal flames and winter

End up hugging my brothers

Thinking about what it means to give up, persistence

My father’s woods, yoga mat in the morning

Breaking in the sunlight, flying crow pose warming

Thinking about secrets, the keyboard to come home to

The empty passenger seat road trips

Tyler Durden says “You are not your job.

You are not your fuckin’ khakis.

You’re the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world.”

Search for a five-dollar bill to give the Causeway toll booth single-serve friend

My father was talking about the government 

Shouldn’t be able to enter your home without a warrant

I mention my book and Nixon in 1978, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

Pull up chapter three on my laptop; offer; turns his head away for one more cup of coffee

My father asked if I wanted to join the peeps in archery practice

After fawning over his custom woodwork bows for twenty minutes
Closes door 

I tell my mother I feel like my father is comfortable in his circle

Does not want to grow, I don’t expect him to, I just love him in his circle

She says that is about right; I asked her if my father talked to her

About what happened out by the fire; she says no

First rule of man club is you don’t talk about emotions you have in man club

This morning I put my yoga mat in a carpet of pine needles under rows of loblolly pines

I saw a turkey buzzard fly solo from east to west

I thought to myself; I think about this every day

Somehow it creeps in, like keeping an eye on a locomotive

Just in case I forget the schedule and I am accidently playing hobo poker on the tracks
"I'm trying really hard to find a way not to let them drive."

The night before Thanksgiving

I had a moment with my parents on their sofa with a DVD of End of Tour I brought

I told them, “I’d like to watch this movie with you sometime. 

I think it would help you understand me more.”

My father just stared at a reality show Forged in Fire about knife-making on the History Channel

My father says karma is real

I think of my younger brother’s friend I talked with at a punk show 

Shot to death on his sofa in his living room by an intruder

My older brother says John Lennon was a fake and full of shit

The morning after Thanksgiving

My older brother shows my dad an iPhone video about a bear banging his testicles on a rope

My father is entranced, laughs his ass off rolling on the kitchen table

The day I left standing out by the archery range

I went to tell my father goodbye and said

“I think how you were unjustifiably the shit-kid growing up, sister father’s’ angel, brother mother’s

Grandpa was an outdoorsman and you took the one thing you bonded with him and built this.
If he were alive, “He would say, my God son look at this place. I am so proud of you. I grew up in a one room shack at the dead end of a swamp road. You have a wife and three sons who love you.”

I told my dad, “I don’t give a fuck about the politics. We are not all different. You are my father I love you I will always love you. I know you don’t understand me or why I have to write or be the way I am. When you got up at five a.m. to work out the union hall to go wherever they sent you when I was two or did an A.C. system change out before dawn and took the call for a second in the afternoon while laying on the floor with Charley Horses in your legs. I got your persistence. I am never going to give up. Life hits you in the face. You be a man. You keep standing. You keep going. I learned that from you.” We hugged. I drove home alone. 

“When my son is a man he’ll know what I meant. I was just trying to leave something behind.”
Maybe all men who go out in the woods are chasing their father.  

Sean Rowe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSgnC5eQ5u0

Instant Karma Bear

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kjY9sKdHlY

End of Tour "I'm trying really hard to find a way not to let them drive." 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md-xi50lGm4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHxx2jCSfbQ