Water Conscious

Cry in the shower. Save yourself a rainstorm: listen to the basketballs falling tropically on the neighbour’s court. Drop-kick a potted cactus for its dram of ooze. Lick your wounds …

Cry in the shower. Save yourself
a rainstorm: listen to the basketballs
falling tropically on the neighbour’s court.

Drop-kick a potted cactus
for its dram of ooze.
Lick your wounds at the watering hole

two blocks upstream. Drool into your beer,
then drift outdoors, take a leak on the levee.
Confuse “tribulation” with “tributary.”

Invite Psycho to supper. Shower.
If cooking up a storm,
cry into the flour.

Try to milk the cat. Lick
your wounds. Empty sacks of rock
salt over anyone’s tin roof.

Percentage-wise, people are mostly drips.
It takes umpteen to plump a rain pillow—
glutton rigged under the eaves

to usher last night’s
downpour to your shower.
Shhh…

This appeared in the October 2012 issue.

Helen Guri