#82 - Playing In The Swamp

Those cosy, shaded days
we would thunder across dark logs
then whoop with mirth

when one of our number fell
to an alligator, its thrashing salmon
rise, the golf clap

of its jaws,
the way, after the death roll,
bubbles plopped lazily from its nostrils.

Once, we exhumed a tinker's corpse
almost perfectly preserved in a tar pit
and set him to sit upright on an old tea chest,

guarding our treehouse
with his charcoal skin
and braces.