Reading poetry out loud, to myself, while sitting on the toilet. I can hear, above me, the flows, then trickles, of water from the upstairs bathroom, toilets and sinks and the long, snakey silver sounds of the draining water, a musical weave through the pipes right behind my head. I am struck a bit by the confluent absurdity, or the absurd confluence… sandwiched between flows of waste, a vertical strata of elimination, sure, but also: the house has a system, organs and pipes and valves and flows, organic combination of mechanical muscles and evolved physics. I laugh as I read outloud, trying to capture a rhythm I think might be embedded in the damn poem– a poem far far better than one I ever wrote– but I have never been good at reading poetry outloud. In fact, part of my desire to effect this pronouncement is the lingering, and frustrating, memory of my poetry days at MassArt, frustrated vowels, duplicitous consonants, patterns awry, and all I ever achieved was a boring stateliness, perhaps, or maybe even a painful overdramatization. Shit. And I mean that. Never a vibrant, dynamic conversation.

But anyway, vertical to lateral, breath is waste too. I mean, let’s face it– we exhale what we don’t need, can’t process; the airy garbage; waste production of healthy respiration. I do tend to forget that.

A cross is formed, a crossroads, an intersection, a juncture where two similar, but different, worlds meet for a moment and then move apart, more different every increment away from the axis… and here, on the transverse of plumbing, out comes poetry, each immortal word a perpendicular puff of invisible waste.