Scatology
This post is not so pretty
Scatology
After giving birth, the second time, I remember the physio teaching me how to, well, poop.
She came into the bathroom with me. I sat on the loo and she stood in front of me, like she was my mother. Sit up straight, she said. Put your hands on your waist. Now make your waist as wide as you can. Push from the top, like it’s coming from your diaphragm. It worked. It was easy. Why hadn’t someone taught me this? After the first birth?
Twenty-two years later, I remember that physio. As I sit on the toilet after a hemmerhoidectomy (try saying that to your lover). I make my waist wide, and push … it … still … works!
How strange it is, this business of being in a body! These growing, aging sacks of bones and blood, organs and excrement: living and dying at the same time, taking things in and pushing them out, eating and being eaten. When I think about who I am, how often do I remember my crap, which is surely as fearfully and wonderfully made as any other part of me? Which is the sign and smell of my passage through this world, my legacy as much as my words will be.
When I am made new, what will be transformed?
Will the change be in what comes out of me?
Or will the change be in me, in how I understand everything, even poop?
I was surprised and honoured when I was asked to read at Australian Poetry Slam legend Jo Giles’s poetry wake.
Jo was a beautiful, irreverent, courageous poet who wrote about the hard stuff that life dishes out with defiant humour. Jo had a “no taboos” approach to writing and performance. Jo spent a lot of time in and out of hospitals.
“Scatology” is the prose-poem I wrote (and read) for Jo.
Vale Jo Giles: firecracker, gut-punch, dragon’s breath in a bird’s body.