Sunday, October 23, 2011

Write By The Park With Purple Mark: Urinal Panic

 

Where are you when you're at your most unprotected moment?

Standing with your back to the door in a public restroom---pants unzipped, hand guiding penis---trying to begin a stream is like being in a gritty one-pump gasoline station on a lost mountain road with a big bearish logger fidgeting in line behind you in navy pin-striped overalls, slapping a twenty-inch, skull shattering, socket wrench into the palm of his labor swollen hands. Pissing exposed feels like the sound of a wild dog---on the eve of the first winter storm---howling into a river of wind where she is so close you can smell her rabid breath and taste the warm muddy bloody drool dripping from the corners of her mouth. And when you glance behind, though the crack of your eye, you can see her lips curl up into a quivering snarl; hungrily she barks, “buddy, you’re a goner. I’m gonna rip your belly open and pull your intestines out while you still breathe.”

Squeezing the first drop out into a urinal feels like primate terror of a caveman busting loose from manacles constructed from six-thousand years of pent-up civilization.

And the question I ask is this, why do they build public restrooms the way they do? It's Rhetorical I know, because it has to do with the logistics of space and the economy of plumbing, but for the primitive mind buried under a thin crust of modernity, it makes no sense whatsoever.


---by William James, 10/22/2011

      I joined Purple Mark, Priya Keefe, Zoe Omega through skype at the Richard Hugo House
      next door to Cal Anderson Park.
 

 

Priya & Purple Mark's Prompts:                                                                         

  1. "Where are you at your most unprotected moment?" Priya's Question.
  2. Where he had gone, Augusts freed both hands from the manacles and unfastened his feet.” Edgar Allan Poe. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. (USA, 1838)
  3. Beside the body were several sheets of charred yellow paper.” Frank Belknap Long. The Hounds of Tindalos. (Arkham House, 1946)
  4. Flying became a real effort.” Frank Belknap Long. The Hounds of Tindalos. (Arkham House, 1946) page 182.
 
 
 

Also check out my new wordpress website. It's a literary journal I am building up called Randomly Accessed Poetics! Submissions are open for short stories, flash fiction, and poetry. I am featuring more polished literary works, explicit language pieces, and eventually a journal a relative wrote in the late 1800's detailing their journey to Oregon on the Oregon Trail. And when I gather enough submitted works from other people, I will cobble together an e-anthology called Randomly Accessed Poetics.

 
 

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