do not pretend
you haven’t grown up to be
one of those boys
who sits on the grass
at the highway rest area
counting thongs
and nudging your friends.
you have, because you are,
I’m watching you do it.

do not gloss over your snickering
when you are called on it,
when it is pointed out
that you only began to snicker
when a black couple pulled watermelon
from a picnic basket, especially when
the white couple next to them
did the same five minutes before
and you saw nothing. do not
play that game.

how did this happen?
all the things you should know,
things you should know better than — you’d think
we’d be past this by now — but here we are
and you’re not showing much progress —

so stop with the “dothead” cracks,
the defensive rationale for using the word
“bitchslap,” the “mustache ride” T-shirt.
stop calling everything you dislike “gay.”

and then there’s the predictable comeback,
after all it’s a free country,
you’ve got freedom of expression
all over your ticked off smooth little face
and you’re not afraid to use it. it’s just
talk, you say. you don’t mean it, really, really,
not like that, never hit a woman, just a joke, gay friends,
no racist bones, fuck you, fuck you, PC sumbitch
fuck you.

now I get, of course,
that the nuances of language are in general a mystery to you
and that you don’t know the difference
between “camel jockeys” and “dotheads”
just by the way I heard you use those words
five minutes ago

so I was never expecting much to come of this.

so, then, one favor only:

stop pretending
you aren’t the kind of guy who does this.
do not play the whistle past the lynching tree
game. do not tell me you never
saw a roofie in a friend’s hand
and said nothing. do not tell me
you never kept the awkward boys who didn’t date
away from your high school lunch table,
and don’t tell me you wouldn’t do it again.

do not tell me you aren’t the kind of guy
who flips off a confrontation over this shit
and laughs with his buddies all the way to the car
and does it again as soon as you reach
the next place you mingle with the rest of the world.

just tell me you’ll remember it
when you first hold your own son,
when he grows up and asks you to explain the way things are.
just tell me you understand that first things last.
tell me something
surprising. tell me
it’s gonna end someday.