Nowadays, there seems to be a thin line between love and hate, art and pop culture, and…poetry and poo?
“Yep,” says one poet. “I turn crap into words that slap.”
At first, it was the classic tale of an inconsiderate floormate. Students complained in the Wayland 3 GroupMe that someone had not learned their bathroom etiquette. “Whoever keeps shitting on the wall in the bathroom: I am going to find you and I am going to shove a stopper up your bum in your sleep,” said one.
“I will kill you,” said another.
We were curious, so we met up with this infamous bard at the site of their creation: the bathroom. (Where else?!) Speaking to them through the crack in the stall, we did our best to make out their speech, though it was interspersed with guttural groaning and the occasional splash.
“Sometimes, people will see excrement and nothing else,” says our poet. “Ahhhhhhhhh, ugh [plop]. Not what it spells out. Not what it says about society. Just the fact that it’s a little bit of—uughghhgh [plop, plop]—human waste.”
Despite both anonymous and non-anonymous threats to the poet and their entire family, they continue to produce masterpieces of manure. What, you might wonder, do they say?
“Some are sonnets,” says the poet. “Some are haikus, and if I’m feeling especially inspired, I’ll craft a villanelle for the people to see. It’s about spreading love. I write what I see in the world. The wall is my canvas. My ass is the paintbrush. [Plop]. What I ate is the pigment. My digestive tract is the machine that makes the pigment into paint. Corn is what adds texture. Coffee is what sets the whole thing in motion. Sometimes I poop a little bird. You get the idea.”
But why this passion for corporeo-creation? Why this need to share their waste-turned-art? An excuse for bad shitting aim? Or the result of over-clogging the toilet, making it necessary for the bard to scoop it up and place it elsewhere, namely on the wall?
When asked, the poet replied: “Life is but an excuse for the harrowing density of it all. Those who understand will see landscapes in my words, and fleeting horses galloping in my song. Those who don’t understand will continue to hate. They will continue to urinate.”
The poet continued, “I am starting a movement. Of the bowel.”