Toilet/Ocean

When I stare into the toilet bowl, I see the ocean
I would swim in the dark with my soul embedded into my feces.
I'd swim through all the winding chutes and tunnels
full of leaves and dead spiders
empty bags of cheetos and run-offs of gasoline
lawn clippings and morning sickness
funeral tissues and drunken pisses

through the coronado i'd be reborn into the deep-blue vastness of the pacific ocean, where the sun would levitate me and the wind would tell me where to go.

Over the island of Hawaii i'd provide shelter for some naked middle age chubby white guy from pennsylvania lounging at a modest resort. In an attempt to escape a painful divorce (and also a numbing cubicle work), he is drinking his third pina colada. His pasty skin's been roasting from the U-V radiation, now it is deep red. In keeping with the "hawaiian" theme he purchased a can of "Miss Akeneki's freshly roasted macadamia nuts with sea-salt". He's been scarfing down the nuts by obscene handfuls along the side of the hotel swimming pool. He tips the can and plops the remainder of the nuts straight into his mouth, cookie monster style.
He briefly stared into the can's artwork of a cartoon hula girl with big enthusiastic eyes, chocolate skin, a purple flower on her left ear, and her palms glued together facing the sky, giving an offering of gleaming macadamias that resemble pearls.

With his bare left hand, he crushes the can made out of cardboard and flimsy aluminum.

Just like the scrawny philipino prep cook crushing the coconut for his pina colada.
Or the fijian lady bartender crushing the ice to make his margarita,
or her shy faggy son being crushed at a game of dodgeball in school
or the U.S atomic bomb crushing the atolls in the bikini islands
or the indonesian military crushing student protesters with their American funded war tanks

Even up in the quite heavens war is inescapable
An eternal tug of war between the cold and warm wind
Where one lets go and the other one flies across an entire ocean with the same velocity as an unmanned missile
Where a violent rainstorm causes equal destruction as a thousand flame throwers

But i'd rather be a raindrop than a water canon's rush.

I wanna free fall onto jakarta, the city of my childhood, as part of an august afternoon storm.

I wanna flood the open sewage lines where it would spill onto the neighborhood streets. Where the poor public school kids wearing their red batik uniform would frolic in the shallow soupy puddle, playing together with the street kids with sticky hairs wearing dingy oversized shirts that say "Nike," "New York City," "Santa Fe," "Chevron," "Conoco...."

Their complete, in-tact, agile young bodies twirling and kicking in a rare state of euphoria in the midst of a gentle cleansing storm. Ignoring that some of their noses have to sniff glue tonight to stay warm, some of their throats must scream to sell newspapers and candies in the morning, some of their dirty hands have to wipe windshields during traffic jams and some of their legs must stand to tend their parents shops... But such punishing, compulsory and routine bodily functions exist to be denied, to be resisted, or to be simply forgotten.

at this moment those innocent and pure mounds of sentient flesh must sing, must giggle, must kick, must breath, must exhale.

Nevermind that one of them, named Siti,
an eleven year old girl,
A girl who goes to public school,
Who loves math, history and poetry,
Or who simply loves the feeling of papers, rough but slippery, running through her fingers
a daughter of a vegetable cart lady
a cook and a caregiver for her two younger brothers,

Nevermind that siti
would later that night catch typhoid,
she would catch a fever so high she'd see a bidadari.
An angel.
A fever so high, the angel would take her to heaven.
Never to bring her back.

Nevermind that a hard life of bone-breaking physical labor and romantic disappointments would've awaited her otherwise.

But i'm not the one swimming in the ciliwung river...
the often flammable river in jakarta, where factories dump their toxic wastes while their workers are living, bathing, tooth-brushing right along side it
Where they dream that landfills would become rice paddies, their stacked cardboard houses would become a warm bamboo hut in the midst of endless trees, the smell of their burning trash would become the smell of ripe mangoes...

I am no longer swimming in the sea...
I can no longer recall the sensation

I am right here, where you are.

To the east of me a sea of starving-looking grass
reflecting the same loneliness of an endless ocean

To the the west of me the formidable icy mountains that continue to function as prison bars

The river no longer reaches the ocean...
steal pipes, upon steal pipes, upon steal pipes recirculate, refilter, remedicate all the filthy water I taint. Leaving the wet, the stinky, the unwanted out to dry. Where the wind would carry the stench and the germs back to my nose.

The pureness of spring water that comes out of the thick lips of the earth cools down dirty coals. Spring water mixed with high-fructose corn syrup becomes abundant fuels for night shift border patrols. It becomes scarce fuels for fatigued beings who must migrate. It becomes fuels for bright neon lights shaped like cowboy hats, pink flamingos, multi-color circus tents.

Without mercy. Without choice. It becomes stuck in a dam.

Like the shower water running off my back being dammed by the hands of my lover.

Like his cum being dammed by the cavity of my throat. or by the cavity of my aching anus.

Some waters we wish to keep and contain.
but all waters have got to move.

Whether in a slow stillness of a lake or in a raging rapid.

Whether in a subtle evaporation of a warm sweat after an orgasm,

Or in a violent tempest of saliva swishing between tongues and lips.

All water's got to move

whether through a retired army general in a tuxedo sipping fine wine at the opera
or around a homeless vietnam veteran eating a road-kill carcass of a cat in a middle of a cold rain.

All water's got to move