The Fall of the Toilet of Usher

Lo! 'tis a gala night

Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

I remember when it happened quite clearly; in fact, I remember it as though it had happened only five or ten minutes ago. It was an early hour of the morning, and I, having imbibed a great quantity of water afore I took to my bed, as is my habit, had awoken with a great and pressing need to expel urine from my sack of pee.

At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!

I approached the toilet with all the reverence and dignity accorded to the situation. Never did it cross my mind that perhaps this toilet would slowly and inexorably fall to the relentless scourge of the eons, that one day as I reached for its pallid plastic lit I would find it turned to dust with the passing of the years, and the bathroom now only a shrine to ghosts and whispers. A wiser man, now, am I, for this encounter at dawn.

Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

My hand pulled down the toilet seat, and I felt it pull away from its mother, like a limb of a rotting tree it fell away in my cruel grasp, and in my horror I let it tumble to the floor. Could this be? Could the toilet, ever pristine, have crumbled? The lid had come undone...but surely the seat...

Out- out are the lights- out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm...

While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

Note: That's "The Conqueror Worm," not "The Haunted Palace," which is the poem that actually APPEARS in "The Fall of the House of Usher." Yes, I am a nerd.