Shitting in Robarts
Here I am, shitting in Robarts Library.
Just when my wifi didnāt connect
Into the academic industrial wasteland of this perfect privileged prison.
They say Robarts looks like a turkey.
I say it looks like a white man with too much time so he wrote 50,000 books and now we call it the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Collection. I wrote his name down in Comic Sans just to fuck him up.
Here I am, shitting in Robarts library.
Just when I thought I didnāt have any more shits to give to this place,
Iāve clearly got one more.
The librarian downstairs at the āHelp deskā looks like sheās chained to her keyboard and the help desk should really be called the āHelp Me someone, please?ā Desk. Her name is Tonya and she wishes the fast food trucks outside sold Demaurier Lights.
Here I am, shitting in Robarts.
The bathroom smells like the bullshit Iām feeding my supervisory committee in my thesis
And the Starbucks barista downstairs is an eighth year doctoral student in Victorian literature. Her name is Alex and she can speak parsletongue but her Methodology chapter wonāt make it past first base with her supervisor.
Here I am, shitting in Robarts.
Wondering why there are so many filled seats in this house of mentality but so many empty bodies yearning for purpose. So many international students given the promise of the Westās tomorrow, driving their depression scars deeper by staying silent about their mental health. So many Pakistani boys lying to themselves that they want to be doctors. So many gay boys capitalizing on their identity for scholarships. So many white administrators acknowledging land ā but little do they know the people here before them would of never put up with this shit.
As the toilet bowl stirs I smell the shit of the academy shifting from promise to prison and I think Iāve been here too long. I think the university made me need it like an abusive boyfriend who tells me I wonāt love again if I leave.
I take a sharpie I stole from the help me somebody help me.. please desk and write āIām queer and Iām angryā on the stall. Maybe a commerce student will see it and go on Grindr for the first time. Maybe itāll be the Instagram story of a second year who just realized that her woman studies course taught her more about her past then she could remember from that night.
Here I am, shitting at Robarts. And Robarts is shitting on me back. And I look at the empty toilet paper roll and think nobody is going to want to clean this mess up.















