"THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO TO A MAN" by Conor Bracken

Conor Bracken is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Competition, and translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine's Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019). His poems and translations appear (or will soon) in places like 32 Poems, BOMB, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Waxwing, and elsewhere. An assistant poetry editor at Four Way Review, he teaches English at the University of Findlay.​

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​THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO TO A MAN


is pity him.
The drowsy daffodil

of his exhausted cock,
the padlocks of his hands

wrung open and equably useless--
how pathetic

is all you have to mutter
to crack him.

How sad
it must have been to have the god of his parents

be a flame
that incinerated each desire it tried to anneal

and how sad
for him his parents never noticed

the ash heap rising in his chest
and how they didn’t care

enough to muzzle
their god long enough

to ask him why he kept
the ash alone inside him and sometimes cleared in it

the vague angelic shape
of the first man

who forced himself on him.
What sorrow

to never have the chance
to say it was to see

if the wind is still
too weak to blow the ash away

which it always is and isn’t
that pitiful? Poor man,

his little boyhood
so much stronger than he is.

Wrestling him into thinking he
is the sole half-troubled maverick

to swagger from the ship
wreck of his past, extracting as he strides

from the ad-hoc leather scabbard
of his body the splinters

he will drive
under the ocean’s rough unvarnished nails.