Yes you struck me from your inadequacy, so there are times when we all feel loveless,
and I see you too some times as a little bow-legged boy,

a motherless child

So we get virgin, we get the holy prostrating fathers,
prostrate she says, wrapped up in a blue mantle.

Meanwhile the red whores and wastelands, deserts of misfiring, and I get the secrets,
the other women, the hush-hush-whisper-who-dares kneeling at the foot of the bed.

I watch you now, fattened in your dressing-gown, and you try, you are brave, you stare,
stare at the shrine of your screen whilst I pay some muted reverence to the back of your head.

And while all is managed around you, such as the daily washing and cooking of meals,
the growing up of your as-good-as-we-can-be-offspring happens without you looking,

like you're in a cloister

Whilst we all around the corners of the world kind of stand there aghast,
watching like a collective constellation the back of our father's heads.

Fore-fathers going on and on in lines for ever into the wilderness,
cowboy shadows on a cactus, the ranch door swinging in the absent wind.

For now I will insist to speak out to every man who will respect to listen,
(and sometimes shout to those who hardly can for whom we are too much),

So that one day we might all turn around and face each other,
just as if our bodies were an eternity of temples,

and bow