Pissing Under Pressure
Mark Hart
War Poetry Contest 2007 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention
A friend told me once, laughing of course,
of the terror of Fenway Park—a long, tin trough
in the men's room, now extinct, whose thunder
would measure the force of a man's instinct.
There on the brink of this gaping oracle he'd stand,
self in hand,
awaiting its chorus,
long in his place with a line behind
in a deafening silence,
soaked in disgrace.
In that moment of pressure
the mind strips you bare, unconscious exposed
to a jury of strangers, eyes to the wall,
standing it seems for men everywhere.
How do you compare?
You seize at the root.
You stare and you stare, flag unfurled,
'til you leave the stand, case closed,
condemned to sit in a stall—
girled.
For boisterous boys outdoors
unzip drawers in plain view with a feral joy,
burn names in snow, force this icy foe
to retreat in the face of their youthful heat
and run away yellow.
And musketeers after too many beers
cram shoulder to shoulder in a barroom stall
for a bet, draw swords All for one and one for all!
to strike in sync at the common pot. Why not?
In their jostle and jeers, camaraderie rules,
each showing his membership card
to this club of fools.
So men, we're told, are supposed to be,
to spill into life in this jocular way, be bold,
aim at the bowl of some corporate goal,
make the gold stream flow,
write their names in snow.
But for some, it not easy
to come ungripped. It's not for me—
I was there, you see, unzipped
in the john, and my sword
didn't flash. Instead, tight-lipped, I was gored
in a good-natured crossfire, a loser of bets,
but sore from a wound that had come long before:
An unathletic boy, quick to tears,
girled on the schoolyard, teased
for a temper I could not contain,
I heard one day as a teen said in disdain
of another,
Can't piss under pressure,
and the phrase grew below in the very place
where a father's red face at his awkward son
and the bruises and welts of words can be found
'til a new fear blossomed on
shame's fertile ground.
Now this one, shy muscle,
this oracle of flesh, not of tin,
will speak its silence in the unspoken discourse of men
with a rattling flood of unruly rhyme.
Are you listening, you men, who stand at the wall?
Can you read what is written in angry scrawl?
I'm making it plain:
Piss on you all
who feel so entitled to make others
feel small!
I'm shocked that you're shocked
when men (and women) in arms act in roles they've rehearsed
and reversed since age three:
On a hard prison floor,
unkindness's stage, prisoners strip themselves bare
to the officers' glee, who, convinced of their liberty,
write names on each page with an ink you can't see.
(Then use photography!) Down under
where men at birth are sewn tight
these surgeons open a slit in the seam,
slip the bastard seed of their cruelty between.
Rammed from behind, up through their pride,
a cartridge of rage explodes in each mind,
lips forming a silent vow—not knowing how—
to blow the dread-cage of this heart apart,
make the floor like a face
flush with red.
How does a man know his true worth?
By length or by girth? Who's on top, who's the best,
who's first? Who can humiliate whom the worst?
Raw mornings I wake with a chest of ground meat,
the sinews of meaning
just don't connect.
I'm not alone in this plight,
I suspect.
Those mornings
I walk to the end of the pasture, I stop
where birches speak truth—white, silent, and tall—
and there I beat the deep drum of this earth.
With nothing to measure but knowing the sum,
I give it my flavor. And the light's soft gleam
appears as a weave in a reborn umbilical stream.
Then my dog marks my scent with hers
and assures herself to her olfactory kind, He's mine.
Under the unjudging gaze of the sky at least
there's solace, and in these woods and the company of
this simple beast
with her jealous love.
If you come really close,
if you undo the clothes of this life,
put your palm to its very skin,
there's just this quivering pulse,
this breath. Once you burrow in,
once you've lived close and dear with that, then
fear is just fear,
and what held you back
from filling this life as you thought your right
delivers you more and more
into its tender, trembling
core.
I once watched a small boy
enjoying his nakedness under the sun
flex the bow of his brown torso and legs and
let his arrow fly, and there came this grin,
this broad, silly grin on him I found in
me as well,
the grin of a young god.
