Ways of Pissing

Myriad the ways of pissing, multidiverse the rain

chirruping in porcelain, on mud-rock coastline

splattering against the fossilised remnants of ancient forests,

burning long grass under a pastor’s bird feeder,

knocking back the wilding plums, dock, bracken.

Who will not piss in a bush, in a shrub, in a thicket?

On a shore, off an oil tanker, from the summit?

Pisses, therefore is. Is a crab pissing under a rock,

a cloud pissing on a mountain. See me crouched,

back turned to the traffic, on the side of a highway;

while I squat there weeing, pudenda poking a face

at the troubled gravel, I am the heart of reality,

inebriated, I piss the incomprehensible logic of the stars,

the air about me ruffled by the passing of the cars;

I am an author of absurdity, equally champion of context,

and no more than pissing in the wind, somewhere,

ejecting in the wrong direction stubborn urine

that in turn lashes the trousers and shoelaces.

Richard Reeve is an Otago poet. His next volume of poems, About Now, is forthcoming from Maungatua Press. Richard lives in Warrington, to the north of Dunedin, with Octavia and their cat Lionel, around the corner from the sea.