Fragility (poem)

Fragility

Misogynistic men are more like glass than they’d ever care to admit See through, fragile things whose broken shards will cut you, Spill your blood and lie in it Leaving them to Bathe in your elixir Lavishing in your agony

Chauvinistic men Drunk On unprecedented notions of themselves They do little more than hold you— Confine you to tight spaces Delegate you to still, lifeless vessels Never letting you spill yourself from their hard Glass cases— They do little more than keep you

And when they break They break easily And often Walls built so high, and so heavy they drag the world with them When they come crumbling down

Be wary of men who see niceness as a vehicle towards entitlement Those that can only build themselves Atop the vertebrae of your spine The work of your body

Such fragility is dangerous It is often violent Inking pain into hands that have been trained to hold it all Onto bodies already shouldering the weight of the world

The best way to avoid it The only way to save a flame from being stomped out Is never to bend to the will of fragile men

Whose entire identities are wrapped in poisonous ego Don’t become consumed by the pressure to gratify To satisfy then beg and beseech forgiveness when your end-of-life efforts, seem not enough Never enough

Instead Wear sensitivity like the armor it is Be shielded in love Sheathed in warmth and kindness

For fragility broken glass and words cloaked in daggers only serve to hurt us all

© Ama Akoto (2018)

#Poetry #misogynoir #busboysandpoets #fragileego #blackwomen #openmic #misogyny