In a few minutes I will abandon
the sun of this back deck and stand upstairs
under the weak warm water.
Everything will change then.
The Man In The Shower
is a different person,
removed from this world
by being plunged into another.
Forced to be largely unmoving,
disconnected and alone, he values and grades,
assesses all that is gone
and the immediate men soon coming.
I do not fear him, but trust his clarity.
He is inert, without input,
standing separate from the day
and its distracting insects.
Through the wall a woman talks on the telephone,
arguing with another woman in Tel Aviv,
while in Brazil eleven Mexicans line up
to face eleven other men who are Dutch.
Beneath the wood beneath my feet
a snake (who lives there) waits,
looking up from below at the soles,
uninterested, thankfully, in eating.
A beetle appears, walking rudely, so close to death
and on the invisible road a truck passes,
driven by a man day-dreaming
of a blow job he will never now get.
Spermatozoa recede unreleased
and without acknowledgment or injection
some fall on the stony ground of never was.
Petals fall to rot.