A Poem

With apologies to R. L. Stevenson, Patrick Brontë, Longfellow, and people who like scansion or have good taste:

Under the spreading chestnut tree,
Dig my loo and let me be.
Glad do I poo and gladly pee,
and I wipe my ass with a will.

This be the stall's fresh-writ graffiti:
"Here he sits where he longed to be,
Having eaten too much chili con carne,
He quenches the fiery arrows."

An alternate first line for the second quatrain is "This be graffito in the WC".

Comments

[eb]

This actually goes quite well with the tragic love story of Cassinus and Cælia.

Since I can't seem to do html in the comment, here's the link:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/cassinus.html

[ben wolfson]

eb, that's awesome. I used to have a book of Japanese folk tales (probably still do, but if so it's many miles away in California); one of the stories concerned a legendary seducer who was utterly entranced with a woman with whom he'd been having no luck, so he decided to try to rid himself of his infatuation by increasingly desperate means, including, at the end, smuggling out the vessel in which she shat and peed to inspect it, and assure himself that she was just an ordinary woman. But she got the better of him by replacing it with perfumed water (with clove, I think) for the urine and I can't remember what for the shit—I want to say carved pieces of some fragrant wood like cedar but I'm not sure.

[eb]

For some reason that folk tale sounds familiar but I can't place it. There's probably a whole category of folk tales in which a man refuses to believe that a woman he cannot influence is really a woman.

By the way, are you from California, or do you just store Japanese folk tales there?

[ben wolfson]

That would be telling.

[Mitch Mills]

I'm a little scared to think about which sites a google search to find that folktale online would turn up. You do it.

[Matt Weiner]

"japanese folktale perfumed water chamber pot" leads us to this cool page (http://www.logan.com/loganberry/solved-m.html), which doesn't answer the question.

[martha mccollough]

I have that story somewhere. I think it was cinnamon sticks. (I just went looking and can't find it.)

Re your poem--line two as it stands is much better than the alternate.

[Guy Lionel Slingsby]

In a library stall at Yale when I was an undergrad, the same stall that had a graffito labeling the latch "John Lock," someone had written:

Breaths there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
"This is my own, my native stall"?