Mr Poretto posts a piece of poetry that I read for the first time when I was in my early teens. I loved Kipling, longed to roam the Indian continent in khakis, to hunt and stalk the most dangerous of game, to immerse myself in the cultures. I still feel that longing, still want to see those places, do those things. “City of Brass” is not about the adventure but about the theft of freedom, among other things, go read and see.

Mr Poretto speaks to the idea that Poetry is not the playground of pansies, that Real Men read poetry too. He’s right. Not all poetry is flowers and butterflies, and a lot of poetry is as manly as it comes. Read the iliad and the oddysey; poetry about war and betrayal and murder and death is as manly as it gets.
My favorite poem is about cows and stones and apple orchards and firs.

Mending Wall
Robert Frost

SOMETHING there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

That’s from memory.

When I was nineteen I read that poem and loved it so well I wrote it down, word for word, I used to carry paper with me and copy the poem over and over again until i had committed it to memory.

Real men read poetry. Damned sure real men wrote it.