Exit the Swamp

at the city center in your brain
is a hole,
a myring, swampy stillness knotting tepid life to reason for it,
next to the headwaters of a stagnant river called Easy Commiseration,
fed by a drift of ditch streams, callow mistaken for simple

that black vacuum there brings the world in to sit down
to placate and forget but mostly to stay seated, dusting over
quieter all the time.

Almost Heroes perish of atrophy,
the best friends of Twain walk so slow
as to be tangled indefinitely in the sidewalk dandelions

it is now your task to run
from it like hell,
to yank gobs of the half hard clay from your skin
and toss it in the street
to retrieve yourself from its static clutch, and
find dirt
for the intellectually sterile