For the first 24 years of my career, I worked night-shift, in places where the bath was done on day-shift, unless there was some sort of elimination debacle on my tour of duty. Now, having returned to my kind, I'm expected to take care of the bath during the night. Yeeks!

But maybe, just possibly, the following poem offers a solution, in the not-so-distant future. I can only dream.

The Last Bath

He'll do anything he can
To avoid giving a bath,
He says it's his destiny
His karma or path,
An oath, vow or promise
A word troth, a pledge,
Some ridiculous rigmarole
About an existential edge,
An invisible boundary
He dare not traverse,
Some voodoo mumbo-jumbo
About the mummy's last curse.

To you, me and most
It's a whacked out, phony reason,
And to most seasoned nurses
It amounts to bold treason,
To allow, or make exception
To the bacterial creed,
Why, it makes my blood boil
To consider this deed.

But he swears on Gideon's Bible
And Kismets Koran,
The Dead Sea scrolls
And some crazy mojo-hand,
He says his ancestral relatives
Passed down this decree,
A mummy's curse will engulf you
If you place water on me.

He states, he has the power
By virtue of a dispensation,
After a sacred, secret ceremony
And fermented condensation,
To annihilate organisms
Within his auric field,
It's futuristic technology
That only he can wield.

It's tough to argue with that
Because the germs are so small,
You need a flippin' microscope
To see them at all,
So, if he claims he zapped them
Who are we to disagree,
He ought to be rewarded
With a perpetual royalty,
For inventing or discovering
This time-saving action,
Heck, in five years or less
It will be the main attraction.

His last bath was recorded
In nineteen-ninety-four,
And if you bother to ask him
He'll say, “Man, what a chore,
That dude in my care
He weighed 82 stone*,
Bath-time was a production
You couldn't do it alone”,
I had to call reinforcements
From Atlas and Bekins,
14 moving assistants
And the last of the Mohican's.

That was the last straw
Of his bathing career,
With just a look at a bath basin
He was quaking in fear;
He was referred to Psychiatry
Counseling and more,
He was offered electro-shock
And downers galore,
But they wouldn't stop the baths
Claiming, nursing obligation,
Whereby, he took them to court
For undisclosed compensation.

A period of disability
Or leave, you might say,
Gave him time to ponder
All night and all day,
To hobnob with mystics
Soothsayers and freaks,
Until revelation arrived
In seventeen weeks.

He learned the science of the aura
The body-electric, some have said,
It leaves pretty quickly
Soon after you’re dead,
But while you’re still alive
If you can master the grip,
You can wield way more power
Than the average ego trip.

So, for the next couple years
He practiced the habit,
Starting out with rodents
And an occasional rabbit,
Soon cleansing their fur
At forty-two yards,
Yes, to eliminate baths……….
It was written in the cards.

He took his invention
To Boston Scientific,
The greatest minds there said
“Man, this is terrific”,
And they induced him to return
With money (and him cursing),
To revolutionize bathing
In the field of Nursing.

Fibril_late;
7/2/08

*The stone is a unit of mass.
It is equal to 14 Lbs and to 6.35029318 Kg.