I am skeptical of you
How do I trust an *****
That's been so wrong
In times past?

You devil,
Reaching out to hold the hand of a new lover
When you haven't let go of the past

It took a long, long time
But I learned how to turn you off
And now that you're on standby
I don't know if I can trust you

Heart,
Battered by baggage
Beaten to the bone,
Do your nerves still work?

Are you able to discern the inner workings
Of the paramour's heart?
Are we compatible?
Are we in love?

Are we loving each other?
Are you able to be trusted
With our great future?

I'm a big Spanish mistake
And sometimes I'm just a mistake
Sometimes I am so burdened with the imposition of others upon me
Sometimes I simply cannot see
Past all of my shortcomings

They break down a flimsy wall, built up by the absence of harm
And then when harm happens,
The walls come tumbling down, and you are left seeing a version of me
That I don't want anyone to see

Much less the entire world
Much less the eyes I look into at my job
Much less the students I try to help as if I'm not an idiot

I am my mistakes
We are inseparable
And once I lose them, and I learn how not to make them,
I can help others who used to make those mistakes
And use that grace I so sorely needed when I made them
Because you can't leave the world with the mess that you found it in
You have to make it better

You can't expect everyone to be a teacher
You can't expect everyone to be a good teacher
Even though everyone should have grace

Just keep telling yourself it'll eventually get better
And it will
Either by happenstance or supplication, it'll just happen.

It's easy to forget how far I've come
Sitting here in a place I've driven to,
In a car I've purchased,
With a license I've earned
With a job I've kept for 7 years,
Writing on a computer I've bought with my own money,
Writing in a language that I didn't learn when I was a child

I'm not just my mistakes,
I am my successes
And I'm how they are handled
And I'm How I handle them
And I am how I handle my failures as well. (as well as my successes)
And yet

I'm neither
I'm somehow expected to be this third, emergent thing:
Human

And perhaps that is what it is to be human

To be encompassed by one's failures,
So helplessly encompassed by them
So terribly encompassed by them,
As well as our successes

I am a collection of the two
Yet neither

Look to the person on your left
And to the person on your right
And pull out your phone, and look at yourself through the reflection of your screen

Each one of you has been affected by toxic masculinity

If you looked and saw a woman,
You saw a victim, someone
Who's been tied down and told what to do
To stand in the kitchen and do the dishes
While the man stays in the other room with the TV
And has an affair with the sofa

I hear the two of them are happily married now,
In fact, the couch and the man are inseparable

The man becomes the couch, and the couch becomes the man
defiling that once holy entrance to that place you used to be able to call a home

When you were younger, you couldn't have known what the world would tell you you are
But now that you've grown up, you felt the pains and gained the scars
Now you know where the world wants you, and what role you play
On this stage, where the director's decrepit creaking hands come and defile you,
You holy sacred place.

He sits there and pays no attention to the hardwork going on adjacent to him
His thoughts are confined to whatever pretty colors and captivating sounds float across that screen
His eye lids shut only to keep from having a drought because he does not contemplate
He just sits there and waits for you to be done making his dinner for him

And what if he's working in the other room, and you can't see it, is there some sort of redemption for this man?
I cannot say, but he cannot expect to stand to the side of his life, pretending he has no emotions, teaching his sons that this is acceptable behavior,

Stop sinking into oblivion!

And when the woman speaks up and expresses these buried emotions, hurt ones, she is antagonized, like
Isn't this just another ***** with her crazy feelings?
Like shouldn't she be watching so that the chicken doesn't burn on the stove?
Like what happens if I let my guard down and let her in
And acknowledge that she is a human being?

The man says he can't do that
He can't lose his power in the situation
So he tells her those feelings she has are invalid
He makes her feel like the antagonist of the story of this man's life
And the only reason she stays with him is because she's developed Stockholm syndrome
And she doesn't want to be alone
And because if she's heterosexual, this version of a human being is the only one that's so readily available to her,
The kind that treats her like garbage, disposable, unable to have her damnable emotions redeemed

But a critique of something doesn't merit doubling down on that ideology you grew up with,
It merits its changing
So,

Men in the room, hear me now

You are victims too!

You are told to keep it in, keep the tears back
To stand up straight, to provide, to not show any weakness,
But you are most strong when you acknowledge those weaknesses openly
And possibly discover that some of them aren't even weaknesses
They're just a part of being human

And this trend is so hard to break, so hard to crack through stone that was laid 22,000 years ago
But here we are
The buck can stop with us

We can stop antagonizing
We can start acknowledging
We can stop treating people as subhuman when they express emotion
We can start skipping in the streets and holding each other's hands

Because there's nothing masculine
About treating other humans like ****

We can eventually reclaim that word, but first it has to be exposed for all the harm it's done

Look to your right
Now look to your left
And look at your phone again

Each of one you can be a part of the solution
Not a part of the propagation of bad myths

To conflate
being in love
With
being happy

The latter so
Often eludes me
But I fall in love
Almost every week

Which is greater?
The love
Or
The joy?

Contentness?
Or
Companionship?

Normally
The two muses
Make residence
At the same time

And they leave me
In the same way

I'm either happy
And in love
Or depressed
And lonely

So, yes, it's easy
To conflate the two, yet
I fall in love with you
All the more

Hi
I’m anthony brandy
And I’m a quarter filipino
Or at least, that’s what my dad tells me
And I’m inclined to believe him because
When I look at the curvature
Of the bones around our eyes
I think I can see it

That somewhere deep down I’m not just a white guy
With a white name
And a whole lot of privilege that comes along with that
But you can’t see it,
And I think that’s what matters

We judge people by who we see they are
And then they become who we say they are

You can’t see it, but I speak Spanish, too
But not because it’s my heritage
Because my white heritage doesn’t have anything to be proud of

I learned Spanish to communicate with others

It all started out as a way to check if people were talking behind my back
And I never even realized that that was a form of guilt-presumption
But as I learned to conjugate and put my words in the right order,
I found out that there are people on the other side of that language barrier
And they have warmer hearts than you could ever imagine
And their arms give the best hugs
And their eyes tell the toughest stories to hear

Like when they came over here, and people heard their accents
They were teased and told to go back to where they came from
And everytime an ******* said that to them,
That home they were told to go back to was always Mexico
Even though Mexico’s not the only country south of Texas

You see, we judge by what we see
And if we’ve never seen or noticed anyone from other countries
We overgeneralize

You can’t see it, but I’m also encumbered by years of religious restrictions
That tell me that my ****** feelings are not allowed
That my doubts have no place near my faith
That my eyes must always bounce
That my vocal cords were meant only for ****** Hillsong songs
And my hands were made to pluck easy four-chord songs
And three-chord songs if you’re lucky

You can’t see it, but there is resentment under this shirt, welling in my chest
And it seeps out of my skin even when I don’t want it to
And I sometimes think it’s best left unexpressed,
But I know, even deeper down than that resentment, that that’s not true

You can’t see it, but I so often feel unnoticed by my peers and my family
Because those doubts that I mentioned before are dangerous,
And my family has wasted no opportunity to tell me that it’s not okay to be who I am,
Having introduced dynamism to my faith
So I am left with only one option:
To hide those things, and keep my mouth shut

What you don’t know, family member, is that when you put on that bumper sticker that said God doesn’t believe in atheists,
You told me you don’t care for me
And what you don’t know, family member, is that when you voted for Trump,
You told my immigrant friends that they should stay away, and that it’s better for them to dwell in their oppression than to even remotely acknowledge it
And what you don’t know, family member, when you tell me how sad it would be for me not to be a Christian,
You tell me it’s not okay to be who I am

But nevertheless, I am who I am
And I will be what I will be
And who I am is a quarter Filipino, privileged white guy who’s trying to do his part
And I wish you could come along with me for that journey
But you are so deeply invested in remaining static,
That I am unsure I can ever help you at all

Telling you stories about my relationships with immigrants can only get me so far into showing you that these people
Are in fact people
And my college education can only get me so far into a conversation with you before you notice that I’m one of those people you call a “libtard”
And you disregard everything I say

I still have my foot in the door, but how long can I keep it open?
When will I blow my cover and be authentic?
Should I have ever kept things a secret in the first place?
Am I just trying to avert inevitable growing pains?

I could not tell you, and I cannot either
But I am nonetheless growing,
Dynamic,
Laden with doubts,
And struggling to make something good come out of my life
I hope you can see that
I hope you can understand
Why I do what I do