Your Other Men
I hate your other men; I hate them all:
Employer, counselor, priest; and those you call
Your friends; and men on television; other
Men you chance to meet; I hate your brother;
I hate the man you think I am; and worst
(By far the worst!), the man who knew you first,
Him with his Sunday morning beer and eggs,
Ogling his little girl’s unguarded legs,
The first to breathe his filth into your ears,
Stalker through the endless nights of years,
Yanking the curtain to one side to watch,
Shameless, exposed and plowed, fingering his crotch,
Or lunging out to stop you in the hall––
Him I hate enough to hate them all.
What on earth can be said about this sonnet?
Terrifying emotions and judgments executed with
syllables that ring like hammer blows, yet finding time for brilliant-yet-awful puns like "plowed." I’m still
recovering from the brilliance of the thing—especially its
amazing turn on its author at the end. I cannot
imagine another set of choices that would embody
and convey the power of these lines. It is a sonnet
that seals off and closes out all other ways of doing
what it does. To call it strong is almost
to insult it. My favorite of the entire Sonnet-off . . . but
I could definitely use a scotch after the experience.
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