Le Sacre de Porcelaine

We currently have a toilet that occasionally emits a high pitched drone, like a tv left on, except louder. This is somewhat irritating, as you have to flush it to make it stop. But the other day, it started to emit two notes at once, which was surprising.

My toilet is a radical.

I decided this today

as I heard it experimenting

with polytonality.

Scarcely cutting edge,

Stravinsky did it ages ago,

but you must admit,

for a toilet, it’s avant garde.

It had been whistling

for quite some time,

but it had always been content

with a single pitch,

or an occasional, momentary

double stopped passage.

And then, wham, out of the blue

come a sound straight

from the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,

and while I had previously

thought of myself as cultured,

it does get grating after a while.

No wonder Parisians hated

Stravinsky so much that night.