Men's Room Sonata in Tiled Minor
A poem by Micah Boswell
The men’s bathroom:
a chapel of porcelain and piss-rules.
Seven urinals.
I take my place...alpha, omega, or the divine center—
leaving sacred gaps for the next
pilgrim of the stream.
I begin.
Soft drizzle. Modest patter.
Then he enters:
Protocol-breacher.
Borderless barbarian.
He chooses the urinal beside me.
He chooses.
And like the Hoover Dam unleashing
all of Manifest Destiny at once,
his stream announces itself,
confident, continental.
While mine
trickles like regret.
I push.
Oh God, I push.
The bladder, it seems,
is also subject to shame.
I finish, wash,
press my palm against the great equalizer:
the moist steel handle of collective hygiene.
There is no foot lever.
No escape.
Only sacrifice.
Later, stall time.
Communion.
A little sanctuary to scroll, to void,
to wonder why the waxy halo of the seat cover
never, not once, behaves.
Its middle tears pre-emptively,
slides off like a jilted lover.
I make do. Sit. Sigh.
Four open stalls.
He comes again.
Sits beside mine.
Speakerphone on.
Wife’s voice bouncing off tile.
He talks of cruise ships while his own departs,
loud, aqueous,
and I, caught mid-tension,
hold back,
fearing to betray the code
by disrupting his lie.
He lies to her.
But I won't lie to the unwritten law of men:
We shit in silence.
The toilet paper roll mocks me.
Engineered to fail,
it taunts with microscopic ply,
ripping like dreams on waking.
I lean, tug, it jerks,
releases with a banshee scream.
Paper sails into the air like ticker-tape
for a championship no one wanted.
He squirms.
I am the noise now.
I am the breach.
I wipe. I rise. I flush.
The water rises too.
Not like redemption.
Like flood.
It keeps rising.
Over porcelain.
Over tile.
Over shoe.
It runs like guilt.
Into his stall.
His cruise ends.
His wife is gone.
He asks, “What the hell?”
I do not answer.
I am already gone.
Shoes squishing out the door.
No hand dryer.
Only memory.
And shame.