Bro / Broken Shackles | By A R Salandy
Bro
'Low blow bro,' Says the adolescent Who hides just beyond The patchy beard- That fills him with a sense of strength In a strange place which values Supposed notions of manhood And little else, But there was a little boy Dwarfed by the expectations Of being a man just behind That tacit facade of a troubled mind- Who tried to conform to trivialities Which demanded primal instinct And sexual promiscuity As a show of superficial strength, But deep within the manly stride Of this child sat a conflicted being Who slowly but surely Became a man who saw beyond- The norms that drove his gender.
Broken Shackles
I imagine crowds that jeer As men were lifted high above Grounds foreign and painted dark- With the blood of beings Victimized and sodomized at random By others of shades so lofty And controversially created That their forced objectification Created a psyche so diminished And contorted still That even decades on Does a peculiar division exist- To maim and bind descendants Who fight to overcome A slow regression into the primitive world Of once acceptable rhetoric and action, But now the worldly rise To reclaim futures and pasts too- Where a distant chant can be heard Where the chained now howl Amidst winds far off As their descendants traverse lands
Created in oppression And forever stained by greed biblical.
Anthony is a mixed-race poet & writer who enjoys the pastoral as well as the depth of human sentiment and action and tries in earnest to express this in his poetry. Anthony travels frequently and has spent most of his life in Kuwait jostling between the UK & America. Anthony's work has been published 45 times in Kuwait Times ('Half Kuwaiti?' ARS), The Kuwait Poets Society's Ink & Oil Zine (June 2019), The Showbear Family Circus and many others. Anthony has 1 published chapbook entitled 'The Great Northern Journey'. Anthony is currently pursuing a bachelor's degree in Sociology.