It would be much better to be a woman,
because women it seems, are expected

or at least allowed, to show some form
of sympathy: some stream of tears

that flows from eyes like dreams
and from garden hoses you played

with in your childhood when they still
used to say, boys will be boys

and when the girls were icky and when
all the things that mattered were getting

too big for old shirts and becoming like
fathers but now everything seems a bit

wasted through rose-tinted glasses: we
are the privileged yet no-one sees the

homes we ourselves have been shut out of
I found that many human things were lost

to me: “You’re weak, son, you cry a lot,
you motherfucker, you’ll never be able

to carry this family, you are a waste,”
the words echo and echo and echo

through the empty halls of my mind
which I struggle to pack with these feelings

and the things we sign up for, wars everywhere,
death to diplomacy, the things we stopped