Suddenly the man realized that poetry could not replace plumbing. It’s what they call seeing the light. He decided immediately to take the poetry out and put the pipes back in, along with the sinks, the bathtub, the hot water heater and the toilet.

‘This just didn’t work out the way I planned it,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to put the plumbing back. Take the poetry out.’ It made sense standing there naked in the total light of failure.

But then he ran into more trouble than there was in the first place. The poetry did not want to go. It liked very much occupying the positions of the former plumbing.

‘I look great as a kitchen sink,’ Emily Dickinson’s poetry said.

‘We look wonderful as a toilet,’ the minor poets said.

‘I’m grand as pipes,’ John Donne’s poetry said.

‘I’m a perfect hot water heater,’ Michael McClure’s poetry said.

Vladimir Mayakovsky sang new faucets from the bathroom, there are faucets beyond suffering, and William Shakespeare’s poetry was nothing but smiles.

‘That’s well and dandy for you,’ the man said. ‘But I have to have plumbing, real plumbing in this house. Did you notice the emphasis I put on real? Real! Poetry just can’t handle it. Face up to reality,’ the man said to the poetry.

But the poetry refused to go. ‘We’re staying.’ The man offered to call the police. ‘Go ahead and lock us up, you illiterate,’ the poetry said in one voice.

‘I’ll call the fire department!’

‘Book burner!’ the poetry shouted.

The man began to fight the poetry. It was the first time he had ever been in a fight. He kicked the poetry of Emily Dickinson in the nose.

Of course the poetry of Michael McClure and Vladimir Mayakovsky walked over and said in English and in Russian, ‘That won’t do at all,’ and threw the man down a flight of stairs. He got the message.

That was two years ago. The man is now living in the YMCA in San Francisco and loves it. He spends more time in the bathroom than everybody else. He goes in there at night and talks to himself with the light out.

The Pretty Office

When first I passed by there, it was just an ordinary office with desks and typewriters and filing cabinets and telephones ringing and people answering the telephones. There were half a dozen women working there, but there was nothing to distinguish them from millions of other office workers across America, and none of them were pretty.

The men who worked in the office were all about middle age and they did not show any sign of ever having been handsome in their youth or actually anything in their youth. They all looked like people whose names you forget.