When you're a male

it begins to stir in you
before you know what's
happening.
The ones you always
avoided
become the ones you
want to be near
whenever you can,
even though you make a
fool of yourself more often
than you admit.
Wild, hopeless, delusional
fantasy
rips through your
reveries.
You spring to attention
even in public times,
when the consequences can be fatal.
If your line of BS is good enough
you begin to live your dreams
in high school;
others simmer in frustrated
onanistic loneliness.
Unbargained for consequences
arrive with jarring suddenness.
By the time you're 18,
the ancient genes inside
you are DEMANDING,
INSISTING, that you
GET OFF YOUR
GODDAMNED ASS
AND DO SOMETHING
about reproducing them.
(And they kick you where
it hurts every single day.)
You find that competitors
roam the plains, stalking the
prey, ready to smash you down
in the hot pursuit.
(And even the closest buddy
can trample you without warning.)
You're at the top of your
game, but often without
a player on the other team.
You erupt in rivers; no wall
is safe.
Your lovers can't believe
that you want another one.
And then, through the decades
you find yourself
being given a less prominent
role in the game. You're
spending more time on the bench.
You search for something
beyond just destroying the bed,
as you try to imagine what it's like
in their head, and as the world demands
your attention to a wall with
a hundred different windows.
Hard lessons are absorbed;
younger men now carry the
action to its heights.
And then, finally, nature or life
or God or the Universe or whatever
starts pushing you off the field, as
your usefulness in continuing
the race shrivels to nothing, in more
ways than one.
And at the end, it's not pushing you,
it's kicking you with muleish hammer
blows, shouting,
"Get out, get out, get out! You had your
shot. Now clear the way!"
But memories persist
longer than one might think,
and maybe a few of them raise a smile,
if nothing else.