These men
are the stuff that dreams are made of.
Not the kind with pirate treasure
buried in fluffy pink clouds,
But the kind with dark castles
with ravens reaping in the rafters.
These men stand five feet tall
above the waist
and fifteen inches below.
Between the three of them they can bench
900 pounds
And add 2 and 5.
These men bear the spirit of human emotion;
from arrogance and ignorance
to anger and autocracy.
But Not Impotence.
They can crush cans with their chests
(Not pop cans, but trash cans)
And they will only date women
with breasts as large as theirs.
They must shave clean every morning
Lest their beards catch in their belts.
They occasionally get arrested for belching
within city limits
(But what do you expect when they eat cheese
from a can?)
The bathe in beer
and gargle with tequila.
They have tattoos of moster trucks
on the soles of their feet.
The others cannot be shown in public.
There’s Dick--
he punched his mother
when she tried to name him Derrick.
He was three months old.
There’s Butch--
He sleeps on a bed of needles
attached to steroid-filled syringes.
There’s Jack--
He had 12 children
by the age of 9.
There was a fourth:
a man who was banished
from the clique of machismo.
People always argue as to why
(and routinely break each others’ fingers
in the process)
Some say he once pulled up a flower
instead of a tree.
Some say he used a condom.
Some say he punched his woman ABOVE the belt.
But everyone agrees,
He was not one of these men.
The moment I came up with this poem I was walking through the halls of my school. I immediately entered a classroom and got permission from the teacher to use one of the computers to type it up. While I typed this poem exaggerating machismo, the teacher was teaching his class about machismo and all its applications in the Spanish language. Pretty ironic, huh?
But here's a better one. In that classroom there is a fish tank, and one day two of the fish who were mates had just laid some eggs. And that morning these two fish were eating their own eggs, all the while the same teacher was reading his LA class "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift, in which the Irish author suggests that people eat their babies to end famine.
Beat that.
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