PHOTO: I'M WATCHING YOU

STORY: SHOPKEEPING: ANOTHER CONCERN IN POTTY TRAINING

A man thought he had a good thing. A shop in a new country selling household items, the star of which were his training potties. People never bought just one. Toddlers trained very quickly to pee and poo independently with his potties, so they really shouldn't have needed more than one. But their potties kept disappearing and the man's shop was in such a convenient location and he never ran out of stock. The drunks in the street could have pointed out that at 3:53 a.m. every day there were streams of plastic, pastel potties walking themselves back to the man's shop, some of them with pee slopping out as they waddled.

The man thought he had a good thing until the night a potty came back with a toddler still on it.

POEM: Grapfeld the Antlered

Grapfeld the Antlered
wandering far afield,
felt cold in the knees,
nose, and soul.

He was looking
for something to do
with his life and the earth was
a wide place to be.

So he roamed
and he fell down a cliff.