He once said that
Men who write poetry aren’t manly.
He lived by an arbitrary ideal
Of tall men, strong men, silent men.
All the flowers and fauna and feelings
Are for girls.
Yet disappointment
At the unachievable
Plagued him.
…
As if the canon has not been defined by men.
…
By Shakespeare and Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron,
Blake, Shelly, and Keats.
By Joyce and Yeats,
And Kavanagh and Heaney.
And Whitman
And Eliot
And Pound.
…
Poetry is a woman’s game for sure
And his toxic masculinity
And fear of poetry
Has nothing to do
With his inability to verbalise
The disappointment he felt
Having never reached the ideals imposed
On his gender.
Don’t dance, don’t speak out, don’t feel small.
Society regulates us all.