We are ourselves the pipes
in any house where we extend out as the vents and ducts ... gurgle and drip.
Too much gas and backup, go swallow the coffee and milk,
such things as our mouths remain open to all day long.
We are under pressure, voices coming up from the sink.
Hot and cold we are taught and under no circumstance to think.
Having more than once carried out our load,
we pursue our migratory selves till off.
We are not so obliging as we are mean or explode:
what we inhabit of a cough,
charged with too much talk and consumption.
We feel now and then by water clean,
ourselves in no unusual way running,
that by established convention
they shall regulate our knowing.

We are all the old and young, connected by every gauge and polyvinyl tubing
to our presumptions and flares.
We link hands, bend arms, claim our living space and more, adopt to our urban
squalor or invade the best.
Too much steam and heat these pipes have got to test
that we run off with now. Nor when the politicians lend an ear,
address our state,
do we do more than cough, our thoughts, clear:
there is no reason for us to hate.
That where we exist along our borders,
we politely wait out our further orders.

It is this plain and simple enough: we gather in our reluctance
and serve a whole household.
Our gift be the skill of the plumber, a period of adjustment, correcting
ourselves, false hopes, banalities.
That what blood we receive, preserve us against our
sanity. We lean on household fixtures secured to all of the valves
and take on a face, these hands, the properness of hair.
We circulate all day amongst ourselves,
speculating on the weather
and know who performs in these dry walls and insulation: we who are
managed by a whole household inviolably.

Every once and a while we hear a tap, tap, tapping
as if we are asked for our opinions.
We dream and think up schemes and know
our time has got to flow
in our veins cool and rich.
It is immediately to our hands that we make our pitch,
wave the inspectors by,
remain huddled in the light and dark
together,
no more fitful than we are stark.
We reach our outdoor tap unsuspecting of weather or reason why.

For we are there
whose selves we entrust to the laundry, meter and heat
and know how we are to go by numbers everywhere
as the patterns we have to repeat,
entering night and some degree of disuse:
a network of our own morality up through the water gauge
to the morning shower stall this profuse.
Only to think that we now believe in our freedom/rebirth,
having gone the route of a household.
We sit uncomfortably in judgment of our worth
and do exactly as we are told.

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The author is a 60-year-old writer who has lived in the Chicagoland area all his life. His livelihood is catering; his love, the written word. He takes for his subject matter the city, Chicago in particular, and from his involvement in Gay Liberation Network and the anti-war movement, themes critical of bigotry and imperialism. He currently writes both poetry and short fiction.