[the anatomy of plumbing]
[lyrics: wagner]


lying down on stomachs on the sodden earth in someone's unfinished basement.
the other plumber and i wait for rubber cement to dry to concatenate these pipes.
guffaws at his own remark about desire to quote lay pipe unquote
and make use of rubbers. and i know it's a can of worms, but i ask:
are women just implements to you too?

he says if not for sex, the genders would never break bread.
i start to speak but he corrects: "men would eat if women would bake the bread."

and i say "is that what hangs on chromosomal lines in your mind?
phallus cacophemisms and mail-order concubines?
have you ever thought to give an inch to romance in your life?"

and he says "listen kid, sensitive is taboo, and taboo is sensitive.
elegant is asinine, and ribaldry is in.
sexual is beautiful, cause beautiful is a receptacle.
chivalry is masturbation, and masturbation's still legal."

i ask him why he took a wife,
and he says "what other choice do you have in life?"
but this, and with kids, a marital parody:
because he prefers the odd parity of singularity.

"well, we have an arrangement," he says.
"i can sleep with whomever i please,
and as long as i keep strangers out of sight,
we keep moving forward with no worries."

dubious as this sounds, i presume he's telling the truth,
and say "you trust one woman with you child in her womb,
but then save your true lust for trysts in the afternoon?"
he shrugs like a pawn carrying out the orders of a strange universe
and says "i do what i gotta do."

and i say "listen man,
is it possible that your schlong isn't the axis on which hangs all rapport?
you'd enjoy my company more than your life partner
if i also knew the red sox score.
does the mind behind a woman's eyes really confuse you
like foreign tongues or alien lore?
or has lechery so cancered your intellect
you can only comprehend her as a potential whore?"

there's something more in the divide
then sex and lexicography between XX & XY.
but we don't have to hide our issues in issues of "maxim" and "modern bride"
when there's so many points where the interests of two sentient genders coincide.
but our thinking's convinced us our different equipment
will keep us at distance except at the nexus
where our physical difference, this binary inverse
puts things down to business and defines
a sexist perspective that leads to innunendo and invective,
misogyny, misandry, self-destructive half-collectives,
apotheotic semiotic nation of cheerleaders and jocks,
stale erotic thrill of shouting "cunt" and "cock"
in locker-room pillow talk.

you think your only course of discourse is to horseplay into foreplay;
bedroom tactics, prophlayctics and ibuprofen if she claims a headache,
like when you whine that feminist critiques are giving you a throbbing migraine.
trust me pal, you're not fooling anyone --
that bulging in your pants is not your fucking brain.

and the anatomy of plumbing is a topic on which we'll disagree today.


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