Listen.
This is not a poem.
This is an autopsy with the lights left on.
You don’t get to ask why the beast learned to bite
when you trained it on neglect and called it discipline,
when you fed it shame three times a day
and told it gratitude was the only acceptable emotion.
You don’t get to cry “monster”
after years of pressing your thumb into a wound
and calling it love.
You abused in whispers.
In smiles.
In rooms where witnesses blinked and looked away
because harm dressed softly gets escorted past the guards.
You learned early that tears can erase fingerprints,
that fragility is a diplomatic passport,
that if you speak sweet enough,
power will kneel and apologize for asking questions.
And the system bent.
Again.
And again.
And again.
So boys learned math the hard way.
Pain plus silence equals survival.
Truth minus permission equals punishment.
Vulnerability equals target.
They learned their bodies were acceptable shields
but their hearts were contraband.
They learned “man up” meant disappear politely.
They learned love was conditional, revocable, and audited.
And when the pressure cooker finally screamed metal,
you pointed at the shrapnel and said,
“See? This is masculinity.”
No.
This is what happens when abuse is insured.
When cruelty gets a halo.
When harm files paperwork and walks free.
You don’t get to canonize yourself
because your violence wore perfume.
You don’t get absolution
because your hands shook while you swung.
Abuse does not become poetry
because it cries well.
Manipulation does not become wisdom
because it learned the right vocabulary.
Not all women.
Say it louder for the cowards hiding behind it.
Not all men either.
But every protected abuser writes the curriculum.
You want to talk about “toxic masculinity”?
Fine.
Trace the supply chain.
Follow the bruises you couldn’t see.
Audit the silence you enforced.
Name the rooms where boys were taught
their pain was imaginary until it became inconvenient.
Because every man you label a warning sign
was once a child begging for air
in a room that told him drowning was his fault.
This is not a request.
This is a reckoning.
Burn the myth that harm is harmless
when it smiles right.
Burn the altar where accountability goes to die.
Burn the lie that abuse needs a certain body to count.
Or keep forging weapons out of children
and act surprised
when they stop asking permission
to survive.