Boys Fight

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With drawings by Michel Gérard

1.

Boys fight.
They are always fighting.
I don’t like this sentence.
I should rewrite it.
Big boys are always fighting for spaces,
territories, trophies, and pleasures.
They fight physically, intellectually,
sexually, creatively, financially
and in all other possible ways.
They fight with each other, big boys.
This is what I do not like about them.

 
 

2.

Is this my ego speaking or my feelings?
At the very beginning of times,
they fight as cavemen.
So, what do they do?
They worship sun and they fight.
Sun goes up and sun goes down,
who knows why. They fight no matter what
          time of the day or season of the year.
Even though they love sun
and they really do, let’s say,
this is what Nietzsche thinks about
                                      Zoroastrians,
even then they fight.

 
 

3.

Sun loves them too, these big boys.
Sun brings them light, warmth, food
                                              and more.
Nevertheless they fight.
Hey, big boys, when are you going to learn
how to stop fighting and give back,
and keep peace?
Do they listen to me?
Do they listen to anybody?
No, they are busy fighting now.
They fight.

 
 

4.

Boys fight in America, in Africa, in Asia
                                           and in Europe.
They fight actually in both Americas,
North and South,
for different reasons and things, it’s true.
But they fight even in Alaska.
Hey, boys, isn’t it too cold there to fight?
And in Australia, where winters are summers,
and summers are winters,
and all seems to be upside down,
and they fight even there.

 
 

5.

Boys fight in my country
and in your country,
and in all countries in the world.
And if a country is an island,
big boys fight even there.
The world is a huge fighting ring,
an enormous battlefield,
an unlimited war zone.
Now even cosmos is turning into
a competitive environment for fighting,
                                                         o boy!

 
 

6.

Small boys, big boys, they fight.
They love energy, more energy, more speed,
more cars, more gas, more oil,
more property, more yachts,
more trips and more hunting.
They fight and we get less water,
less grass, less trees, less forests,
                      less air and less love.

 
 

7.

Boys fight
and get more energy from fighting
                              for more fighting.
They love cosmos and its universal energy.
They love other planets
and energy of other planets.
For them, Earth has limited land,
limited, you see, for fighting.
Big boys, they need more space
for fighting, including cosmos.
And cosmos is extending
and enlarging by itself,
and this is a good news for big boys.

 
 

8.

Big boys fight to compete
and competition is their favorite game,
                                               their sport.
They like to be athletic, to be the first,
the best, the sexiest, the smartest,
the most inventive and gifted.
They like to be the most inspirational
                                        for other boys,
so other boys, the little and the big,
would also fight in their own terms,
                                              just wait.

 
 

9.

Big boys love to be the most eloquent,
the most clever, the wisest,
the most desired, the best dressed,
needed, wanted, accepted, supported,
                                                 and loved.
What is interesting about big boys
is that they fight just for that,
no matter how good or bad they are.
They think that fighting helps
to achieve what they want
and that this is the best way of achieving
                                          what they desire.

 
 

10.

Big boys,
they love to be in the center of attention,
as movie stars, as rock stars, as athletes,
as mainstream boys used to do,
those in three-piece suits with briefcases.
And they fight to become golden boys,
                                        simply meaning
with solid solvent bank accounts
               and the old boys’ assets.

 
 

11.

And again, I am telling you,
no matter how good or bad they are,
these big boys, sometimes
they have energy for social change
that is against their fathers.
I mean a positive change,
         hopefully for better.
But this does not always happen
how we expect or hope for.
I also mean a personal change,
individual, collective, political,
private and public. They fight
for some kind of change, I believe.

 
 

12.

Big boys, they train themselves
and they practice, work out, go to the gym,
work hard, make efforts, they do not give up.
They live as if they are at war all the time,
including the war against the passage of time,
and there is no way they could be defeated
and there is no way they could win.
Big boys, they make their life difficult,
                        often for nothing, really.
I think that big boys
sometimes make good examples
                                 even for girls,
              if they are good big boys.
By that they make girl’s life difficult.
And by the way, when the girl’s life was easy?
                                                               Tell me.
As a result, girls also learned how to fight.

 
 

13.

Big boys are difficult to fight with.
They are our bosses, our teachers,
our fathers, grandfathers,
older brothers, brothers-in-law,
our uncles, neighbors, policemen,
our cultural icons,
our generals, our presidents and our judges.
Big boys are our heritage,
our monetary inheritance,
our tough legacy and our emotional
                       and behavioral burden.
Who could tell me where it all goes?

 
 

14.

Big boys fight.
They try, this is how they grow
and this is how they mature.
They also try to discuss, to negotiate,
to collaborate, to work as a team,
accept the other, compromise, share
                                       and exchange.
Nonetheless, they also fight.
What I mean, simply speaking, is
that boys fight defensively
       and often aggressively,
and sometimes even sadistically,
and this is a mental illness
          that might be healed.
Or not. It can be healed, but only if big boys
become conscious about their defenses
in their own lives and in a whole world.

 
 

15.

Remember, big boys fight.
Why do I write about that?
Don’t I know from birth that they fight
                                                    and how!
Do I still want another world,
as if I am myself an infantile fighter,
an oppositional teenager
or a failed public intellectual
who tries to resist those boys?
Do I want to stop the Achilles’ raging attacks
so I could stroke him and calm him down?

 
 
Marina Tëmkina is a poet-artist whose interdisciplinary and cross-genre practice embodies her multi-national immigrant experiences. Her books include the poetry collection What Do You Want? (Ugly Duckling Presse), three artist books such as Who Is I? (Content), two books produced in collaboration with artist Michel Gérard, and five books of poetry in Russian (two of which are published by NLO). Tëmkina has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, among others. She also works as a trained psychotherapist, specializing in refugee resettlement, cultural difference, and gender and identity.

Michel Gérard began exhibiting his sculpture and drawings in the early 1970s, when his work was informed by surrealist idioms and the energy of 1968. Gérard experimented with the demonumentalization of public art and the status of statues. Later, in the 1980s, he created several large-scale site-specific public art projects in forged steel, coal, and handmade paper responding to the decline of the industrial era. Over the past three decades, he has worked with the memories of his childhood in occupied Paris during World War II. Gérard has had more than 50 solo exhibitions in galleries and museums in Europe, the United States, Japan, Korea, and Israel. His work has been included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Berkeley Art Museum, Musée Pierre-Noël, Stadtische Kunsthalle Mannheim, and Fattoria di Celle Sculpture Park, among others.