America
“People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times
as opposed to once. They end up using more water.”
Donald J. Trump, 45th President
of the United States of America
Marizio Cattelan’s solid golden crapper
has gone missing, prematurely
ripped
from its moorings at Blenheim Palace,
the birthplace of Winston Churchill
in Woodstock, England.
The irony is breathtaking: A theft from the birthplace
of the man
who saved western civilization
of the contrivance essential to the very existence
of humanity
as we know it. Over the years
an armada of typically porcelain relief receptacles
has afforded generations of leaders and followers,
noblemen and
commoners alike, momentous
moments of mercy and, for some, mystical inspiration.
The famous
psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson,
in his justly ignored book, Young Man Luther,
argued that Martin Luther’s constipation rendered
him
terminally antagonistic to the bowel
paralyzing rigors of interminable hours imprisoned
in the
confessional. Peristalsis became, for him,
a manual task only enabled by long walks around Rome
where he became disgusted with sales on indulgences
and the
blatant salaciousness of his fellow
clerics which convinced him that absolution,
as well as
laxation, is something strictly
between a man and his God. Absolution probably
wasn’t on the mind of Thomas Crapper, royal sanitary
engineer to
King Edward VII and King
George V, and inventor of the floating ballcock which
enables our
toilet tanks to fill with water
and, notably, the U bend plumbing trap in 1880
which vastly improved the S bend trap because it
cut the odor by leaps and bounds and,
thereby,
pleased both monarch
and prole. Hence, the term
“crapper”
which has rightly immortalized
the inventor of this life saving/sustaining appliance.
Crapper also invented the man hole cover, but
I shall
leave that connection to the few
psychoanalysts left who might prattle
on the
subject. Deep into this poem
I realize that I have neglected to mention
the title Cattelan gave to his lustrous creation.
He called
it, “America.” I suppose,
being Italian, Cattelan, felt a kinship with
his
countryman, Amerigo Vespucci,
argued by some to be the true discoverer
of our large land, and felt he could comment
on the dire
situation in which we find
ourselves with a billionaire in the White House
who feels put upon if forced to
read
anything besides the wrapper on a Big Mac.
Still, he is a billionaire, fixated on gold and
most certainly
convinced of the greatness
of his kak. What better contrivance to welcome
and contain
the presidential poop than
a solid gold commode worth three million dollars?
No one has direct knowledge of where Cattelan’s
crapper has
gone to, but investigators could
do worse than work their way into the living quarters
of the
White House, which is, of course,
the people’s house—a place where even the lowest
among us deserves, in this democracy, to defecate
in the same
splendor as the leader
of the free world, a right we hold to be not
only self-evident,
but the very essence
of the pursuit of happiness.
--Charlie Brice
Charlie Brice is the author of
Flashcuts Out of Chaos (2016),
Mnemosyne’s Hand (2018), and
An Accident of Blood (2019), all from WordTech Editions. His poetry has been nominated
for the Best of Net anthology and twice for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared
in
The Atlanta Review, The Main Street Rag, Chiron Review, Permafrost,
I-70 Review, The Paterson Literary Review,
and elsewhere
