Why is Poop Political?
On Saturday, President Trump posted an AI generated video of himself in a fighter jet wearing crown dumping shit onto the No Kings protestors. Around the same time, something was cooking in my brain about sentient poop. The feces, having become sentient, was in rebellion against humanity and seeking autonomy. And so I wrote this poem (which you will find in the soon-to-be released “Doodoodality: Shots Fired From Uranus”)
Once the turds gained sentience
They expressed great resentment
At comparison to a certain President
Who was often called orange excrement
“What an insult that is to fecal matter,
For even the most petite shit splatter
Nourishes plants, and gives insects food
Which is why we consider it incredibly rude
To compare us to such a self-centered dude.”
Now, some of you may be wondering why I’m writing about the fecalarity, an event where fecal matter becomes sentient, and writing a freaking poetry chapbook about it with my karaoke metal band NypSlyp.
Well, the fact is, poop is political… 46% of the global population lacks access to safely managed sanitation, and 1/3rd lack access to safe drinking water. The stillsuits Fremen wore in Frank Herbert’s Dune pressed the 75% of water out of solid waste, although that’s often glossed over in movies based on the book, which tend to focus on sweat and urine, because a lot of people think poop is gross.
When Pooet Laureate Anton Cancre – the editor of Haipoo: Poospectives in Pooetry, invited me to participate in his upcoming multiauthor haipoo collection Haipoo: 2 Poo 2 Furious, I was delighted. Scatalogical humor is hilarious, juvenile, liberating, and a fertile territory for politcal humor, which is why there are so many jokes about the orange turd in office.
I asked if my karaoke metal band NypSlyp could collaborate, and as the sometimes horrified staff of the Mint Karaoke Lounge will tell you, all three members of NypSlyp are obsessed with feces and love talking about crap. As a matter of fact, that’s part of why and how our original commitment to create 10 haipoo grew into an additional chapbook filled with limmershits and other forms of pooetry focusing on the fecalarity – the sentience of poop.
My dear wifey Skunkheart Chris Hughes literally worships a shit goddess and wrote this pithy haipoo about the actual value of something people think of as having no worth:
Question: what else grows
Our food and our flowers, if
Not our holy shit?
Feces is the basis of food-growing fertilizer, a renewable source energy (biofuel, and methane gas), and even certain life-saving medical technology like Fecal Microbiota Transplants (FMT). Trace metals are extracted from feces. There are many examples of human and animal feces being used to create bricks, or silt to bind bricks together, in construction. Raising infants and toddlers means being comforable with feces, as does having most kinds of pets.
The third member of NypSlyp, the mysterious Backup, known for his creamy mudslides, has deep thoughts on the sentience of feces:
Tao of Poop
If a turd gets cut in half,
does it turn into two sentient turds,
like an earthworm?
What if a little splatter of shit
goes on one side of the toilet?
Is it alive?
Learn more about NypSlyp and The Fecalarity this Halloween, when Doodooality: Shots from Uranus debuts in bookstores and bathrooms near you. And look our 10 haipoo excretion into Anton’s amazing and long-awaited, star-studded volume of pooetry, Haipoo: 2 Poo 2 Furious in Spring of 2026!
*** photo is of a 3D printed poop emoji (printed by Backup), lounging atop a cocktail glass at The Mint Karaoke Lounge. Photo was taken by Sumiko Saulson.
Sumiko Saulson 