Issue
#3

May
2009 

a poem by Joseph Goosey

WHILE AT WORK

While at work I go
into the bathroom stall and hide.
I don't do anything in there.
Not number 1, not number 2.
I do not masturbate to
stored mental images of large pupils.
I simply hide.
I sit down on the toilet.
I need to sit.
I rest my toes in there and think of
items swinging from a hook.
I think of sweating while chopping
bamboo in the August months of Florida.
I think of the time I was holed up
in a Key West hostel, a stranger
banging on a thin door, screaming for help
finding his
room.
I think of whether or not in Denmark
there exists the worlds foremost translator
of Frank O'Hara
Someone's got to do that, I suppose--
not me.
I have no proficiency of language.
I think of all this
and by the time I have worked through it
I've been sitting on the toilet for about 45
minutes.
In this time
people have knocked, 3 or 4 of them,
wanting to shit, to wash up, to change clothes,
maybe even wanting to hide
themselves.
I hear the sigh of disappointment--the
audacity of someone else using THEIR toilet!
Then I hear their footsteps on the cold tile,
then the door.
Then finally, magnificent
silence.
I know that eventually I will be found out,
that I will be fired and I will not complain,
appeal, or even
mind.
I also know that eventually
I must emerge
but not quite
yet.

© Joseph Goosey

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