COMING NIGHT

I am sending a call to the men of a certain age.

Men like me whose decades give them keys to locks, lock on the door that opens onto the unknown world.

I am sending a call to the men, not the women who nurture and feed the children,

To the men who are keepers of the myths, tellers of the stories around campfires where we gather after the hunt, rivaling the wolves: a day, a life, an epoch of keeping the wolves in their place.

I am sending out a call to the men, not men who are strong, not men who are weak, but all men.

Those who will summon within themselves, as I do, the courage to scale the steepness to the cliff, and to jump.

I am sending a call to the men whose disgust with the ordered arrangement of the hours and moments and seconds is fevered like a young man’s, who want to fall down and scream out to the universe: “I am here.”

I am sending a call to the men who are despised, the spit upon and jeered at, the marginal, the hated, whose pain creates a parallel universe of beauty without which the haters would perish.

I am sending a call to the men who love each other, some who mimic the others and some who rebel, those whose love is tidy and printed in the Sunday New York Times and those who continue to trawl the gutters of Chelsea and SoMa and Halsted, those whose stench has sweetened my nostrils and brought me sharply to my senses more than once.

I am sending a call to the men who are lonely, in a room with only the dancing pixels to animate their neurons and excite their dormant imaginations, deadened by the effort to get up in the morning, living for their next dose of Paxil.

I am sending a call to the men, the ones I’ve never met, the legions I yearn to meet,
standing shoulder to shoulder at the top of the earth, standing on the frozen tundra with upstretched arms, standing tall with pride and power, standing in the sunlight of the supreme, standing without shame.

Ready to follow and ready to lead, ready to dig deep down into the endless reservoirs of wisdom that have flowed into their lives, ready to offer a drink to the stranger who still wanders with empty eyes, ready to stand with the others in the sunset, ready to face the night.