Member-only story
Ode to the Toilet
A Free Verse Poem On the Essential Maintenance of Everyday Life
Your thin cold rim
has startled me awake
more times than I can count
brought me to my knees
in ceremonial prostrations
to hang my head low & deep
in the coolness of your bowels
to express my sins all night
in sick & drunken confessionals
hell Mary’s & promises of redemption
or to bow down and take my vows
in the lineage of women who as girls
have had haloed brushes shoved in
the palm of their hands by their mothers
to become apprentices in the craft
of cleaning, anointing & blessing you
in holy blue liquid Lysol waters
the same way Mary Magdalen
washed & anointed Jesus’s feet
before his crucifixion.
Isn’t this what you deities do?
Wake us up to what we can’t see
within ourselves or within the dark night
where someone has left us
to prostitute ourselves on
the the porcelain edge
with our pants down & the…
