The Cosmic Meaning of Flushing Flies

Marcel Duchamp, "Fountain"

Here’s a midweek humor break, a mock elegy by my favorite writer of light verse.

My father has a very tender heart, which means that it has devolved upon my mother to do the mouse killing in their house.  (She was also the disciplinarian when I was growing up.)  My father was even willing to let beavers live and let live until they built a dam over the filter in the lake that supplies them with their drinking water.  That being said, I don’t know how deep his qualms go about flushing a fly down a toilet bowl.  At the very least, the prospect makes him think twice and look for a larger message, as he does in the following poem:

The Fly Flushed Down the Toilet Bowl

By Scott Bates

That fly you flushed in the toilet bowl
Was alive as you or I
You may debate about his soul
But what a way to die

You watched him struggle watched him kick
You watched him fight to live
You could have beached him with a stick
Or strained him with a sieve

You might have scooped him with a jug
Or proffered him a pole
You might have cried Alas Poor Bug
Before that toilet bowl

But no You chose to do your worst
And dropped him down the drain
Take heed Beware Though he go first
And you behind remain

There’ll come a time without a stick
Without a saving board
Someone will watch you cry and kick
His hand upon the cord

Someone will watch you gasp for air
He’ll muse upon your soul
and yawn and turn to comb his hair
And drop you down the hole

In the reference to “hand upon the cord,” I note that my father is referring to a French toilet. Ask not for whom the toilet flushes–it flushes for thee.  The poem was published in Lupo’s Fables, Jump-Off Mountain Press (Sewanee, TN, 1983).

 

Note: Two other posts on insect poems, written after the famous incident two years ago where Barack Obama killed a fly while being interviewed on national television, can be found here and here.

 

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