19 20 STEALTH MAN’S MANIFESTO Theodore Lopata English Major Poetry ignorance is written in two scars beneath my chest; cowardice is dripping from my lips which have shamefully forgotten the taste of salt and ash how lucky I am to deal covert references behind easy eyes and assumptions each word a forceful fist to any number of my friends’ aching guts I hide. I watch them crumbling around my knuckles. I watch them bisected by burning stakes and scaffolds and paint thinner while I laugh, because how funny it was, that the woman at the hospital thought I had changed the other direction and we laughed and laughed and my boyfriend lay dead in the first room on the right. the woman was relieved that I was not trying so hard. riots erupt on the doorstep of my city; revolution is a shotgun through my chest which roars in surgical lines to run from the action. how disgustingly lucky I am to choose in a day when and when not I exist when and when not I belong in official reality on official websites. I think, therefore I am purgeable. therefore, I look the other way. my sister flees north and my roommate courts a passport and my stepmom is still empty over lunch: I stare into these eyes of other sacred deer, scared at different distances that indefinitely distinguish us. I could speak. my soul is cowardly. the deer explode. “I care so much I’m sick” and paralyzed and turning my back and closing everything I ignore newsletters and masterdocs and eulogies; I know about the war, but shut my eyes which have seen so complacently little I weep over my boyfriend and I cannot help him the planes will not connect us anymore and now I cannot say anything to make it safe What could I have said? Tell me. I want to know what I was too afraid to do. Is it still worth it to be brave? I don’t know if I want to know which swallows me in confusion every hour but I am too grown for my sister’s bedtime stories. neither of us can say it will be fine and this is the crux of my transformation “this is part of [my] becoming a man”: trying to convince myself that guilt is harder to swallow than shame If pride is resistance, I cannot let myself be charged with inaction, but goddamn it is hard with this gun in my mouth
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