I never liked science.

I was terrible.

I never understood the four layers of the earth which was really five.

I always forgot all the bodies of water. The continents were too hard to pronounce. And the whole acid into water or was it water into acid? Yeah didn’t get that either.

But now that I’m older, there’s something new troubling my brain.

How we define our men.

See we’ve labeled them. Drilling into their brains that they’re not who they are but what they do. You are basketball. You are medicine. You are TV. You are rap. But if there’s anything I learned from second grade science it’s that the crust tells you nothing.

Personalities are cracked open at the core but some of us find it too hot to leave the mantel so we wait in the atmosphere. Slowly drifting with the clouds left to wonder what would happen if we fell through.

There are five main bodies of water with shifting tidal waves that men can either sink or swim in. Mechanic, athlete, doctor, lawyer, or entertainer. Labeled before they know the difference between a binky and a pacifier. Doggy paddling as we hold their heads underwater fighting to breathe. Every degrading act of violence we call motivation.

They struggle to pick one of the seven continents we’ve given them at birth. They either live on lazy, pathetic, dog, broke, dead beat, liar, or successful and not many live there.

It’s cold, inhabited by few like Antarctica because we’ve given more blows to the ego than pats on the back. More hands have met cheek bones than they’ve touched hearts. They are forever engraved with a hand print but it’s up to us to decide where it lays. Like a carbon footprint, it always makes a mark but not always seen.

Never knowing whether to pour kindness into discipline or the other way around. Because acid looks like water and water looks like acid but acid doesn’t help plants grow. We feel the need to go beyond creators. We’ve put the atoms together to build the molecular constructs that make up such beings but our job stops there.

The future is withheld upstairs where it belongs. Safely encased in the hands of our maker. The blueprint master. The one who takes care of all our worries so when they grow up, they look more like men instead of boys playing dress up in daddy’s suit.

We need to extract the societal prototype, and rebuild the brain of the male gender.

Because honestly, it’s lost its touch.

Put Adam back in the frontal lobe so that patience and understanding can be back at the beginning.

Take Joseph and gloss him over the temporal lobe so that strength and creativity may lead them.

Drill Paul into the center of the parietal lobe so that love and forgiveness can transcend through them.

And pack David into the crevices of the occipital lobe so that they understand they always have God to fall back on.

The Lord did not create men in the structure they are in. Society has molded them like clay and let it harden like Playdoh in a form that is unfamiliar.

So I suggest we melt it down and start over.

I’ve never been good at science, but it doesn’t take a genius to understand that men are worth going to the core for.