The Eighth Wonder

The eighth wonder of the world
Has gotta to be the seat of a toilet bowl;
Rodin's Thinker, I tell ya,
Is rightly dressed for the stool session,
But wrongly stooled;
He should have been seated
Yes, you guessed it, on the ample rind
Of the toilet bowl seat;
Then again, I may have my history
Wrong - maybe they hadn't invented
The good news to a man's gluteus yet
During Rodin's time set.

Ah, the tortures man had to sit through
While waiting for the inside sewers
To clear off its load, before
Someone invented the ultimate solution:
A toilet bowl with soul -
A seat on the bowl
To deposit your haunches on
While your internals work out its deposits.

It is perfect as a bicycle is perfect -
You can refine it in any number of ways,
From an automatic sensor to temperature
control to an interactive robotic bowl
Costing a cool million - not yen but sterling -
But the basic design of seat and bowl stays,
Just as a bicycle can be modified in more ways
Than one, the frame-seat rig is always
As was done.

And to think man had to bear
A thousand years of severe posture,
An affront to his posterior;
Why, until only recently,
I'd rather the squat toilet -
Aka Chinese torture - prefer;
Or did it behind the ferns,
Enjoying being close to nature,
When the situation warrants.

And the first man to make a toilet bowl seat?
You tell me!
Just like its inventor was never credited,
Many a gem of an idea, a seminal thought,
A breakthrough to an impasse,
Could have been cracked while its Source
Was seated on the ring of a toilet bowl,
Without even getting a mention, until
This verse - haha - even if
Only generic, not specific.

Who knows if the world would have been
Any different today had Chief Crazy Horse,
Shi Huang Ti, Napoleon, Lenin,
Benefitted from it in their day;
Who knows the extent an easy passage,
Down in the internal sewerage,
Eased by a toilet bowl seat,
Could have influenced it -
Bush's tilt towards the Middle East.

And what if the Sultan of Brunei were
To reinvest the proceeds from the sale
Of his solid gold bowl to revive
The dysfunctional sugar groves
Of Mozambique? Would the Africana
Milling in the streets of Lisboa
Return home in droves?

What if, while encamped on a seat,
Yours truly came up with the germ
Of an idea of writing this poem?
Would you begrudge it?
And to think I discovered
Its use only the other day.