My dear fellow Isla Vistans,

As of Saturday, my apartment has given new meaning to the phrase “crappy college apartment.” My upstairs neighbors apparently do not know how pipes work, and when they threw a party they decided it would be a good idea to stuff loads of paper towels down their drains, which in turn led to the biggest shit-storm of my undergraduate experience. Yes, that’s right, my apartment is now covered in feces. Poop waterfalled from the ceiling into my shower, a place where I will never feel clean again. And it flowed into my bedroom, soaking my carpet and filling the air with a putrid sewage smell. For the next two days my apartment is being ripped up to replace the carpets and dry out the place. Luckily, my landlord has realized my housemates and I are not to blame, so we won’t have to pay for it. However, I felt the need to write a poem to commemorate this weekend’s commotion. So here it goes:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
A tale of feces no one holds dear.
On the 10th of May, in 2008,
Four upstairs neighbor-girls made me irate

The night before, they clogged our apartments’ shared pipe with wads of paper towels
Because the toilets in their bathrooms overflowed from movement of their bowels.
My housemate, The Pet, at almost precisely noon
Noticed something foul and uncouth in his bathroom.

From the ceiling dripped yellow water onto the shower floor,
So he quickly ran upstairs to tell the girls, “Shower no more!”
My neighbors agreed without any hesitation
And assured my housemate of their shower stagnation,

But as soon as The Pet walked out the door back to our apartment down the stairs,
The girls turned on their shower either out of stupidity or lack of care.
He ran up to them and shouted, “Turn the water off now!
If you don’t my apartment will soon become a canal!”

But the girl who heard him took her sweet-ass time.
She cared not one bit if our apartment had slime,
So slowly she walked to relay the message to her water-loving pal
That after only one minute, our apartment flooded, thanks to that gal.

Six inches of fecal matter and urine rained down on both our showers,
And it made a mess for which clean up would take several hours.
Then the liquid trickled out onto the carpet in the hall
It overflowed into the bedrooms and into the drywall.

Now our home was literally shitty and smelled like poop,
But the girls were too busy taking shots to give a hoot.
That is, until our landlord placed the blame on them.
Then one bitch came down to say she would not pay the bill, not again.

Once was enough, after they let their toilet overflow for an hour,
And the water leaked through our ceiling, and into our shower.
We didn’t have a ceiling for a week, while they fixed that mess,
And the girls had to pay $600, to their distress.

Lucky for us, the landlord is on our side,
So he made sure they will abide.
After he told the girls they would have to pay,
The girls argued they didn’t want to, no way.

He came downstairs, and shook his head,
“No beauty, no brains,” he half-jokingly said.
So for the next two days, our windows have to be closed,
Because a humidifier and floor-dryer are imposed

On our home after the carpet was replaced.
The floors were drained and now we faced
Two days of loud annoying machines in our rooms
And a horrible smell worse than exhaust fumes,

But even worse than that is the mess, so we can’t be showering,
Because it will take days to clean up and lots of scouring.
My neighbors would be scrubbing the floors with toothbrushes if I had it my way,
But I’ll also settle for the landlord cleaning and making them pay.

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