UNCERTAINTY
A day without women
By Amber Tamblyn
At dawn on this day,
men wake as slivered lunar shadows;
waxing masculine,
waning strands of strength;
partial projections of living,
the lonesome s’il vous plait of silhouettes.
Men yawn, reach for a bigger, better breast,
stare at their ceilings and think about
what they can control today.
Men roll over in bed and kiss
no one good morning,
on this particular morning,
on this particular day.
Men rise, dress, don’t eat breakfast,
drink weak coffee and share mediocre jokes
with the kitchen curtains.
Men spend the day sharing
very little with each other
and even less with themselves;
their hearts hungry,
wholly alone souls
like spooked colts adrift from a harras of mothers.
What’s a mother, They ask each other.
Men get ready for work,
walk by a room in their house
built for a daughter
they do not have,
they step out onto the street
and fall in line
with the rhymthless strides of other men —
a sea of them.
Only men.
All day they shake hands, their worlds
a stench of shoelace and old pillows.
Men eat soft steaks for lunch and daydream
of rare, tender mouths.
They do not bathe.
They just put cologne over the problem.
Men spend the day
surrounded by themselves
and the repetition of their own-ness,
the monotony of same alchemy;
chromosomal homogeny.
They are their bosses, their friends,
their waiters, their teachers, their house keepers,
their President, their mail man,
their strippers, their family, their cooks
their artists, their care takers,
their activists, their accountants.
Men spend the day fighting
other men as a form of conversation,
speak from what they know, never
what they feel. Use weapons as sex,
and get into wars as ways
to say I Love You.
What is love, They ask each other.
Men come home to silence.
Men come home to television.
To the succulent scents of past, to hollow refrigerators,
to unopened shaving kits and the echoes of their snores.
They greet their egos at their front doors
with a hundred pushups,
or maybe a fart,
or rub their starving hips against anything curved;
banisters, mail boxes, statues of animals.
Men stare in the mirror and see
no sense of future.
Something is missing.
Something missed.
They sense they do not exist.
Perhaps they don’t. Because,
who gave them life?
What is life, They ask each other.
What is life without women?
Amber Tamblyn is an actress, director, and author. Follow her on twitter @ambertamblyn.
