Man o' Man

Floral-facepaint shotgun tattoos

ring around ya eyes like a sucker punch does.

I pushed the barrel down your throat

till I came and no one

called me out

on the

irony.



Man oh man o man.

Remember that show from the mid 90s, where the guys in barely anything but forced grins lined up on the edge of the pool and were pushed in by a frenzied party of 120 women? If you didn’t fit the measure of shape, smarts and some good old aussie charisma, you got wet.

Man oh Man o man.

Quote from the show: “Does the man who has everything have huge pectorals and a big brain, does he want to change the world or is he quite happy changing the nappies, does he play footy or does he play scrabble??”

*Audience laughs*

———————-

I’d watch this show as a 7 year old kid, and go to bed; the next morning mourning of what was there but was no longer visible anymore.

I’d recall my version on the way to school, pause it and replay it, pushing those big solid buttons on the VCR machine we didn’t have but had seen at friends’ houses, over and over.

In my version, a few of the fellas slipped on the concrete pool edge and cracked their skulls in the dress rehearsal… came up for air a little too late.

The resulting brain damage had them limp n somnolent, easy to be strung up by the balls as the whole audience got to watch the sole oriental audience member dismember the smallest man with her teeth, carefully tucking her own penis through the back of her legs like the loose end of a tug of war rope.



Drive fast enough through your back paddocks

and all senses can be flattened.

I had you sniffing shit out from under my armpits

and calling me brave for it, bending your ears

till you couldn’t tell if my words were allies or all lies.


Taste.

You could’ve tasted my lust from the back of the lunch line; had you been hungry for justice.



Smell.

You could’ve smelt the chips-n-gravy of bullshit I reeked of; if we hadn’t of broken ya nose so many times.



Feel.

You would’ve felt the contradictions steam off my skin, if we hadn’t of numbed you so well.



Instead:

I named you faggot on our lunch break, then went home to dream of being done up the ass by effeminate grace.



I called you gay cunt and told the others around me to harmonise on the brutal short syllables to give them more aural presence.



I cornered you up the back of the oval. Held a lead bolt off the bottom of a gate up my sleeve, looking hard and swelling inside at being on the edge of begging to be pulled apart and shot with floral facepaint and pinned down and fucked infantry man style.
No holes barrelled.

But I was a good actor and you never even knew, let alone everyone else.

Re-run re-run re-run.

I’m so sorry for all of it.



I’m as Man o Man as the next man and for my betrayals of self and you, feel as small as the penises that shrunk in the cold pool water.