The Polish Hammer Poetry Corner
Beards
Back in my day, a beard was a woman you’d agree to marry when too many people began questioning your need for such an extensive Barbie collection and your fixation with drinking Rose wine with your brunch.
Nowadays, everyone has a beard. Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I saw a clean-shaven face. For some, it’s a throwback to the Duck Dynasty era where a ratty beard hanging halfway down your chest somehow imbued a man with some cosmic insight in the workings of universe as it pertains to a shitkicker existence. For other men, a manageable beard presents an aura of unquestionable masculinity. This is usually called the “J.D. Vance beard.” For a guy like Vance, it is integral to cultivate the beard for when it is coupled with his thick mascara, the distich keeps the Zelenskys of the world off balance. As long as Vance continues wearing pants in public, that beard is all you really have when attempting to decipher his gender. And in the Republican world where only two genders exist, that preciously trimmed and oiled beard is all important.
In Alabama, you can’t throw a lawn dart in the air without twenty-seven fools, their lower faces obscured with what looks like the ass hairs of a goat, pointing out how lawn darts were criminalized back in ’88 by an overzealous government intent on legislating our private, backyard activities.
Inexplicably, cornholes are all the rage, now. The first time a buddy offered to whip up a game of cornhole at a neighborhood fish fry, I was infuriated. In my day, real men played horseshoes. We men, real men whose overgrown facial hair was a direct result of conveniently forgetting to shave for two months, dug pits in the earth, sometimes with their calloused hands. We took sledgehammers and pounded steel stobs halfway into the ground where they rose up like iron cocks ready for the metal shoes from the thundering hooves of stoical cowboys’ horses. We hurled horseshoes all over the fucking place while we drank beers, beers that tasted the way beers ought to taste – like the strong, fermented piss of donkeys raised on a strict diet of asparagus.
Today, men with precisely manicured beards throw bean bags at slightly elevated boards with little holes cut in the top center. Bozo circus-shit, really. But in order to allow these tough guys to feel manly about their clown games, they buy boards bedecked with the insignia of their favorite sports teams as a gentle reminder as they drink their banana and strawberry infused Natural Lites, as they fondle their bean bags as though they were the testicles of their buddies, how truly strong and masculine they are with their fervent love of the football and their deep-seated respect for Trump’s batshit crazy policies and a nagging suspicion at the base of their lizard brains that Kid Rock’s music will stand the test of time, Joe Rogan is the Oscar Wilde of the twenty-first century, and Alex Jones was right about everything.
Fuck, man, I grew up with Dick Butkus jabbing his fingers into opponent’s eyes, now we got Travis Kelce with his simpering beard prancing around like a goddam ballerina in pads. Fuck football.
Anyway, the last time I played a game which involved beanbags, I must have been in kindergarten. I don’t even remember the game, I just recall running around with other like-minded, manly kids, throwing the beanbags at each other’s faces. We were troublemakers, and you could tell it by our little five o’clock shadows, the crackerjack tattoos of wolf’s heads on our arms, and the faint tang of Old Style on our breaths because cheap beer was the only thing our families could afford for breakfast.
I didn’t even set out to write this column about beards (despite the title). I wanted to perhaps write a cool fifteen hundred words about the last twenty sexual conquests of the Polish Hammer, or, perhaps, an in-depth study of the use of the word “avocado” in Chuck Palahniuk’s latest embarrassment of a novel, but a funny thing happened at the place I call “work.”
We were all gathered around for one of those jackassy state-of-affairs meetings we sometimes have to remind each other how management is awesome and the rank-and-file factory workers really need to step it up a little bit when I looked around at the conglomeration of co-workers and was struck by the utter proliferation of beards. How was it possible there was not a clean-shaven face in the entire bunch which included two women. Even the pedophiliac preacher sported a beard.
There were several guys for whom the beard went beyond mere lifestyle choice to the very definition of who they were as humans. They also wore strictly camouflage, any other color brighter than gray automatically signifying homosexuality in its wearer. The others were merely beard tourists, guys who reminded me of the wife’s kid who face-timed his mommy to show off his newly acquired beard. Really, man! You’re in your mid-thirties, pushing out the cheek fuzz isn’t the flex that requires mommy’s faux astonishment. I look back at my pictures from eighth grade confirmation and see a kid who looked like Kurt Russell putting the flamethrower to a jackass alien. When my son grew his beard out several years ago, he didn’t ask my opinion, he just asked for money to pay the goddam light bill. What the fuck is wrong with people?
It shouldn’t vex me so much, yet here I am. I think it might have something to do with the fact that when I look in the mirror, I see that I, too, have a glorious beard. It looks truly excellent, shot through with just the right amount of gray to give me a distinguished, not yet homeless vibe. It’s almost luxurious enough to divert attention away from the complete lack of hair on top of my head.
And now, my wife wants me to shave it all away.
I’m not prepared to make this life choice.
You don’t define yourself by your beard, do you?
No, I have a strong chin. I don’t care; I don’t need it. I can dodge fruity microbrews and avoid cornhole tournaments just as well with or without a beard.
Then shave it so I can see that babyface again. You’re always looking for ways to contradict the mainstream, spit in the eye of convention as it were. Like the way you write stories that nobody wants to read.
Fuck, I think. It would have just been easier to continue enjoying my Rose for brunch and not care what anybody else thinks… Why is it that I have to change when it’s the world in need of a shifting status quo?
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
