I used to play unafraid. There was
a Winter under the free step of Spring
but I ignored it as long as I could, was not
aware that life and bodies would change
as early as I had flown with the earth
thirty times around the sun.
Around my thirtieth birthday my balls
began to sag.
I choose truthful words over the poetic
to be blunt with a loving audience like
you, who has little time to dilly dally.
“Anything more than the truth would
have seemed to weak” said Robert Frost
while depicting another day of bad
farming in the northeast of native land
cultivated by the White.
The paint of snow is another thing;
Something there is that loves walls,
the devil a rake in orange hair pretending
at thrones “to be like other nations,”
the prophet Samuel’s request like a snake
in grass, a forbidden fruit to look
at your ass—
I should have married and stayed true
to the Wife of my Youth!!
But no. They laughed at me when I said
I kissed her.
They laughed at all the children who
wanted to report their first crush, but
had a sibling unchecked by drunk
parents who abused and scoffed at love.
I turned to alcohol and sports over love;
Pretending I did not love Anne, JJ, Melanie
and Amy. Megan, Barbara, Beatrice and
Kristin—the list is so long, the eighth step
amends of men who were wrong.
And in all that delay, that time of dysfunction—
the body kept growing, aging, never a girlfriend,
intimacy for me not there.
I woke up near my thirtieth birthday with
beautiful pubic hair.
But something had changed. They dropped.
My balls. Sagging like an old man.
I was a virgin in the sand. No kids. No love.
And I was slowly dying, evidenced in the
extended sack between my legs!
Dying! Dying before I had lived, I would
journey three more years before landing
a girl willing to have me inside her; I had
to shave my homeless beard before she
did it, but she did it, and we did it, and
I forgot my sagging rocks that night!
But sometimes, when all alone in my
beweeped state, in a lonely forty-five year
old single bed I reach down, then down some
more to feel at near-lifeless tissue—
sagging sinew, a scrotal reminder of time
flown, aging and reasons to write a poem
a young boy might read to help him change
his ways immediately.
Tell her you love her. Now and forever;
against the hum of haters and potential regret,
laugh at them with four kids on your lap,
instead of a thought of sagging naps.
God is with me, don’t get me wrong, my sagging
rocks a reason to pray the harder, help
the more, get out of self—youth on the other
side of service’s open door…
Bill Watkins, Traveling Poet 