The male loneliness epidemic.
Real thing or no?
An accurate description for a problem
or a misrepresentative umbrella
for several individual, if not wholly unrelated issues?
Veiled misogyny or a name to focus solutions on?
Are we taking care of our responses
when they cry men are lonelier than ever before!?
I remember when I was pushing back
against people screaming ‘All Lives Matter!’
but what, besides the realities of the problems at hand,
makes everybody’s lonelier! any better to say?

Because for me
it’s not so much about a house catching fire
and needing saving from oppressive flame
but a house sickened with insects
needing treatment for infestation.

Truly, we are a people further drifting apart
with the tectonal shiftings of infinite access,
but would you disagree that there’s a demographic 
clearly not coping as well with it all?
Young men running into the incongruence
of reality versus the media they consume–
movies, games, pornographies,
and all the anachronistic ways
male role models say to be a man;
how divorced all of that is becoming from daily life,
how easy it is for one to lose their way.
Is this something that should be denied?

Yeah, maybe the words are wrong
and yeah absolutely, men are using those words
to justify bad behavior, but change
doesn’t and never has happened in a day.
Is it not better to keep a conversation going,
to maybe find and refine more effective solutions?
Ways to assuage unemployment, uneducation,
emotional damage and the many atrocities
men will commit against themselves?

‘Cause when we’re getting to those points
I don’t really care what it’s all called,
I just want to see issues actually addressed,
whether that’s simply giving a man space to speak
or, particularly by the good and wise men,
to show the new way that masculinity should be.

Or, you know, you could keep chasing them
back into the shadows
where they’ll bond in commiseration
only to return for next elections
in greater and stronger numbers.