(P) The missing men
1/ There is an empty space where a man should be. There is an outline of a thing-not-here that should-so-be-here I can feel his not-being-here. There are boys drowning in porn or boys who are told they are girls or boys lost in the vast territories of their anger.
2/ This is an empty house haunted by an absent father, a negligent brother, an uncaring uncle. Spirits given over to their pleasures and easy absences, free floating vapours of men, no flesh to them. They cannot fix a car or cuddle a sick child, your hands would pass through them
3/ Smokey silent men who drift from place to place and suffer the little man children in their absence. These are gas ripened boys staring at their computer screens like secret hidden cannabis plants stare at heat lamps. These are boys forgotten to the pleasures of others.
4/ The natural world is out of order, the clockwork wheels of man and woman no longer bite or tessellate or in orderly rhythm set down on a gear chain and move differently but together. The machinery is come apart, the belts whip wildly, the cogwheels jar and repeat and ruminate
5/ Ruminate is what these boys do. Small boats trapped in a Dead Sea with no wind spinning endlessly considering gender and anime and computer games and bureaucratically making of their lives 100 tick boxes, 100 flat, facile flags no man would fly, 100 excuses not to grow
6/ These little boats with 100 ways to stand still and never feel wind in their sails or brave choppy waters uncaring for their pronouns. These men to be stranded outside port seduced by wicked sirens and mermaids singing them lies.
7/ All men who are males who have about them the million different ways of being masculine are captains of voyages with unsure crews, uneasy waters and uncertain supplies. The booking navigators, the deckhands with their fortitude, the ship’s poet. The Captain.
8/ These Hardy voyagers and their different way to be men. They have forgotten the boats behind him. The boys have barely left port and they spin in the tides, they are blown off course by deceit. Where is your cartography for these lost souls?
9/ How will you chart a course for these boys? They will drown in pornography, they will ruminate and lose themselves in gender, they will be scratched away at by sirens of the deep who seek their flesh, they will jump overboard.
10/ Fill this space where a man is missing. Into this vacuum will rush only the terror of the deep or nonsense filling the ship with seaweed and flotsam. Men must lead men must lead boys who lead boys. Emptiness and gaps on the map must be charted. Abhor this vaccine of men.
11/ All good men are stories but these repeated early chapters of men will be books half written if they men about them do not put down their pleasures and find their balls and turn these pages. Men are not meant to live their lives in computer games or lived abandoned to comics
