Leisure at The New Roman Baths (First sharing of poetry on the site)

As I promised, I decided to do more and share some actual writing with you, stuff I thought wasn’t doing any good just sitting in my hard drives.

A few years ago, I decided to try and dive into some poetry. Since I have no conscience, I decided now would be a time to share some of those I am not absolutely embarrassed by with you, the reading public. Enjoy or not, I’ll understand either way. 🙂

 

Leisure at The New Roman Baths

Ames, Iowa 6/10/2012

Everyone in America,

Are you ready for the same old thing?

Summer’s here and we’re required to hang out

at the aquatic park funland of the nation.

Not required to get cancer baking in the sun,

Even if the preteen boys do that by accident and the teen girls do it on purpose.

Iowa girls don’t get their tan from a bottle, for sure.

Now that I’m tucked into a corner of the park, I see how the facilities

Are designed to separate people from their cares and their money.

There are the outdoor pools for the city kids, and indoor pools for emo kids who want to stay out of the sun.

I do that, even though I’m not emo.

There’s plenty of fun food that puts out a siren song to kids and adults;

The foodies are pretty much screwed, however.

Hot dogs, corn dogs, chili dogs, burgers, cheeseburgers, pizza, chicken and beer

(whiskey and vodka are too un-family friendly, beer and skinny wine cooler are upscale enough).

All of these things inhaled by betrunked and bikinied bodies pleasing, lumpy, and lumpily pleasing, that you wouldn’t see anywhere else.

Looking past the bodies, I noticed how the entire compound was just a string of pools –

Big cool pools, superheated whirlpools with sweating pale men, long simulated chlorine rivers with nothing alive but tourists and bacteria, tunnel chutes of water that shoot streams and humans with equal velocity, even beach pools with enough sand for those who missed that unique grit in their shorts.

I take in the pools, swimsuited singles making conversations, the food sand snack shacks, the T-shirt and curio stands, and I think,

“Where have I seen this before?”

And, it comes to me.

The Romans.

The Romans, of course, with their bathhouses of old.

These weren’t places just to wash up; people went there to bathe, swim, steam, soak, whisper, gossip, pronounce, shop, eat, idle, sport, rendezvous (often with the other gender)

I looked around the faux woodsy cove and realized that they had rebuilt the old Roman baths right there in Wisconsin.

They’d added a lazy river and a wave pool and subtracted the courtesans,

Which made the sporting gentlemen sad, I guess.

2,000 years after the Romans, it was the same swim.

Does it say anything about America and its people? Maybe.

But just think if they could bring this to Vegas – they could really cut loose.