POEM - Flushed Reveries

I. Rimbaud Made me Do It

And for the fourth time this week,

Yellow water greets my arrival

At my favorite thinking spot

So I dispose so I can repose

In relative sanitation

As my thoughts drift

To awful flotsam and jetsam, passing

Below my perch of prominence,

Down slimy pipes rushing forward

To a meeting with Rimbaud.

He knows this river.

Arthur was never one to miss

The feces among the flowers,

The blood in the wedding bed,

Vomit in the air, pervasive.

The drudge and sludge to wade in,

Some metaphor lost to putrid

Excremental thoughts.

Loose it quick,

One last vomit and I have had too much.

Stay in Hell Rimbaud

I have other business to attend to.

II. Wall Scrawl (Left on the Bathroom Wall at Maricopa Community College, c.1994)

Share something beautiful on the wall of the stall

make it sound meaningful or say nothing at all.

Petition the holy muses and write their whispered verse

create a lifelong sonnet before you're in a hearse.

So as your lower sections are practicing their art

and before you pass out from the smell of that last fart,

leave a message for all the world to see

and maybe they will read it the next time they go pee.

III. The Earthquake (California, 1991)

Floating amidst the rolling landscape

Inside a suddenly fluid second story apartment

I nearly died

Of a massive toilet enema.

Earthquakes are not in my repertoire,

Helpless, I sit,

Caught with my pants down,

Amidst the big one

I hope and pray I am not the headline

For all the morning DJs to read:

Man found with toilet up his butt,

Death ruled accidental.

Apparently he prayed

To the wrong porcelain god!

Amazing how many thoughts make appearance

Uncontrollable, massive and scattered

Like the moving fault I straddle,

Consumed in morning rituals and fear

Only able to sit and wait

For deliverance or death.

I don't think this is what my Nordic forefathers imagined

When they wished for a death worthy of a poem.