(Response to misinformed feminist poet)
Not every shoulder in an airport is a declaration of war.
Some are just menâŚ
half-awake,
burning their tongues on bad coffee,
late for gate C17,
thinking about rent,
or their kidâs soccer game.
But someone writes a poem,
and suddenly heâs the businessman â
the villain.
The sting without the bee.
Not every man who said, âI donât believe in labels,â
was dodging a leash.
Some just hated boxes,
the way words lock living things inside.
Some of them loved harder without a label
than others did with rings.
But nobody writes poems about those men.
He said he liked her hair another way.
Maybe it reminded him of his mother,
the woman who read him bedtime stories
when the world was falling apart.
But in the poem, heâs a chauvinist.
No cross-examination allowed.
There were men who fixed the leak at midnight.
Men who held doors,
held breaths,
held their tempers while the world baited them.
But they got folded into the punchline.
Another âboyâ in a list of wrongs.
Their quiet was mistaken for guilt.
Their hesitation, for harm.
Some said âperiod sex is grossâ
because no one ever taught them otherwise.
They werenât gagging at her.
They were gagging on their fathersâ silence.
The one who didnât say I love you fast enough?
He wasnât a monster.
He was terrified.
Not of love â
of being written into someone elseâs vengeance poem.
He was standing at the ledge of his heart,
waiting for a language that wasnât a trap.
Not every man who walked away was running.
Some just got tired
of opening their mouths
and hearing the same labels echo back:
chauvinist.
toxic.
boy.
Their stories were pre-written.
Their names replaced with archetypes.
This isnât some rehab for men.
This is an ode to the mislabeled.
The men who walked gently through a world
that kept calling them wolves,
even as they were the ones
building the fences.
They werenât saints.
But they werenât the villains in your receipts, either.
They were just men.
Complicated.
Flawed.
Human.
And maybe,
just maybe,
worth a verse of their own