Oh, great turd!

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Oh, great turd! Look at you, lying
there in the bowl, so hard, and 
strong, and solid. What should I
do with you? Should I lift you 
out with my soft bare hands and
place you down gently into my 
lap? Then buff you up and clean

you? And take you along to the 
open-mic night? Maybe you wouldn’t 

be lonely. You could be at home with 
all the other shites. 

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Or, maybe,
I could send you to a poetry 
magazine? Perhaps Poetry Academics 
Weekly? And receive a £200 cash
bonus, and they could break apart 
your stolid, turdy structure, get 
through the wet-brown, and tell each other 
they understand your meaning.
Or maybe,
I could give you a name? Like Carol Anne 
Duthie, or Norman McCaig? Then 
you could be used in the national
curriculum?
Or maybe, I should just leave you
in the bowl. 

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Oh, great turd! Poetry used to 
dance and 
sing and play like
music in your head. Was music
in your head. They
sung it in Greece and Rome and
Mesopotamia and the 
Romantics sang it too, and the 
bards with beauty and 
passion and
rhyme. 
But, great turd, we no longer 
sing 
and there’s magic and beauty in our 
words no more. And no spark, 
song or imagination. Or energy,
or lightning at all. 

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Just you.
Great turd, 
in the toilet bowl.

I’ll call you contemporary poetry.
 

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