notes on ‘Sketches of 16 Men’

I have been roughly half of these, at some time or another.

The reference to ‘childhood home’ came after writing the rest of it and needing a way to end it; something to rhyme with the word ‘poem’.  These are really meant to be contemporary / modern-day things that I have done or seen other men do; so I am not personally meant to be the ‘reader’ in the last stanza  But I guess there is an implication that we watched our fathers do a few of these things also, when we were younger.