Poem for Display at a City Reservoir

Attention suicides: please have the consideration to drown elsewhere. It is not that your body would be especially toxic — that’s a myth. But what we crave in water is an absence of taste, not the taste of absence.

Also, kindly make sure your water bill is paid up. It’s the least you can do for your neighbors, who will soon probably be needing to recharge their own reservoirs, those brown or blue pools in which on occasion you may have glimpsed yourself, smaller than life.