To the Pay Toilet - A poem by Marge Piercy

You strop my anger, especially when I find you in restaurant or bar and pay for the same liquid, coming and going. In bus depots and airports and turnpike plazas some woman is dragging in with three kids hung off her shrieking their simple urgency like gulls. She's supposed to pay for each of them and the privilege of not dirtying the corporate floor. Sometimes a woman in a uniform's on duty black or whatever the prevailing bottom is getting thirty cents an hour to make sure no woman sneaks her full bladder under a door. Most blatantly you shout that waste of resources for the greatest good of the smallest number where twenty pay toilets line up glinty clean and at the end of the row one free toilet oozes from under its crooked door, while a row of weary women carrying packages and babies wait and wait and wait to do what only the dead find unnecessary.

Comment 1 of 1, added on October 10th, 2005 at 11:24 AM.

this poem, I felt, lacked just about everything it needs to be called a poem. If the line breaks were removed, my best way to test a poem, it has nothing that would make sound, feel, act like a poem. not to mention it uses workds that make no sence in this situation. Look the word strop up and the meaning makes no sence in the context. gulls have nothing to control wheter they go or not, in fact they cannot stop themselves and don't squauk over not being able to go. There are no rhymes, no meter, no artistic use of words, no metephore, no illiterisms. the only reason one might mistake this as a poem are the line breaks. and if they are removed this would be just what this it. a complaint made by a woman with poor use of the english language.

none of your BZ from United States

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