When he was a young lad,
something happened that came to haunt him --
an emblem of the ultimate terror of his own small life.
He was only eight and signed up that summer
for swim lessons at the city pool.
The lessons were at nine,
but one morning his parents dropped him off late,
nearly ten, and can you imagine his chagrin
when he mounted up those stairs and saw,
not a pool full of manly little men, his classmates,
but -- GIRLS!!! The pool was full of nothing but GIRLS!!!
Why, he broke down and started to cry,
the hot shameful tears of a betrayed child.
Later, while recuperating in the pysch ward
of the local hospital and still in that fragile
state of paranoia where all things bear messages
of a hideously cosmic and ultimately personal nature,
he found, in a casually sampled magazine,
an article title suggesting the benefits
of sex-change operations. He hastily slammed
the magazine closed, hastily slammed it back
in the bookshelf. He never mentioned the incident
to his psychiatrist.