A tug of war usually has two teams pulling against each other, but in J. Martin Strangeweather’s “Tug of War” the rope is inside one mind. The opening imperatives—“Be real,” “Be fake, be sweet as boring cake”—set up an immediate contradiction, and the repeated “Be real” between them sounds less like a command than a self-nagging. The poem’s core question, “How does real feel?”, shifts the argument away from what authenticity is toward what it feels like, and that is where the trouble begins.
The speaker’s answer is built on a moral chiasmus: “Real feels right, / but right feels wrong.” Real ought to feel trustworthy, yet the speaker experiences that trust as suspect. The examples are deliberately unflattering. Real is like “punching you in the face / for the hurtful things you say,” a violent reflex rather than a virtue. It is “horny,” an appetite. It is the exclamation “Gotcha!” and “anything said upon stepping in dog shit.” In these moments, realness is not wise or noble; it is simply the thing that escapes before politeness can catch it. The word “feels” carries the stanza—authenticity is not argued but registered in the body, in anger, lust, triumph, and disgust.
The fake stanza mirrors the real stanza exactly: “Fake feels wrong, / but wrong feels right.” Again the moral vocabulary flips. Yet fake is not cartoonish evil. It is survival. The images lengthen into a chain of quiet compromises: “putting up with mistreatment / to keep your job, / looking the other way / to keep your friends, / keeping your mouth shut / to keep your reputation.” The repeated “to keep” builds a list of small silences, each one preserving something external—work, friendship, reputation—while spending something internal. The lines are longer and more controlled than the abrupt curses of realness, as if performance requires more syntax, more management. The earlier simile “sweet as boring cake” already hinted at this: fake is pleasant but flat, easy to swallow and not especially nourishing.
Sound and layout sharpen the tug of war. The poem moves in very short lines, often two or three words, so each turn lands like a pull on the rope. Near-rhymes appear and vanish: “fake” and “cake,” “real” and “feel,” “right” and “wrong” as conceptual opposites rather than chimes. The repeated pattern—“Real feels right… Real feels like… Fake feels wrong… Fake feels like…”—creates a seesaw rhythm, but the symmetry is deceptive. The final couplet breaks it: “Fake becomes real / long before anyone realizes it.” The line break after “real” enacts the delay in recognition, and the verb “realizes” carries the word “real” inside it, as if awareness and the transformation arrive together, too late.
That final turn is the poem’s central insight. The tug of war between authentic impulse and social performance is not a fair match. Real is loud, ugly, and immediate; fake is quiet, reasonable, and gradual. But because fake is practiced daily—at work, among friends, in the management of one’s reputation—it stops being a mask. The poem refuses to romanticize authenticity, and that is what makes it significant. It treats real as a punch and fake as prudence, then warns that prudence can quietly become identity. The self that keeps its mouth shut eventually has nothing left to say.