Swamp of Sorrows
I dream of the swamp and its lonely ghosts. They have moonblown faces and paraffin eyes, melting and hardening and melting again, like the candles that gutter inside the heads of rotting pumpkins. Have you see them? They are thirsty. They do not levitate the way I thought they would, but drag their feet across the mud and muck and rotten leaves. There are rumors of who they were and how they died: confederate soldiers who camped out here, in their pup-tents and mildewed clothes, nursing rotten limbs and eternal erections, dying from the heat, from boredom, from the absence of all tender life—but it doesn’t really matter. Understand that they’re dead. Understand that this place is haunted.