Tom Scherer The Great Dismal Swamp Train Derailment 

Bog monsters remove their caps,  lower their gilled heads in due  respect for the big iron  fallen from the tracks 

Toadstool men toddle to see  what all the damn commotion is about 

Gators, too, the swamp’s warm hosts,  motor on through with big dumb grins  

All to find that sleek and slender loco  motive (named Georgia by poor young  Percy Buchanan, who got flung from the cabin  into the muck. (His body will be forever fossilized below the roots  of the Bald Cyprus trees)) 

611 is her real name   A yellow-eyed cyclops  with skin of black-red-gold  corroding green and brown  as the metal minerals, oil, and even  steam, all crave a return to the Earth,  as they sink below the dismal swamp  (who’s great no more) 

You can thank the company  men for that (signed Robert E. Claymore,  President of N&W) 

Georgia and her seventy-thousand pounds  

of black coal entrails are raining, spilling out into the piss warm waters;   obsidian nerve gas semen 

But the crocs and the toads- tools and the gilled creatures  of the quag are no strangers  to top hat man toxins  And with shovels and gas masks  in webbed hand and fin, they tenderly end  Georgia’s misery  

Let us take you under our wing,  says the living swamp  As we did one-hundred years  prior for those tortured souls   on the run in need of a salvation 

No man or woman or child neither has long since found haven   here in the moist mosquito ridden air  

We are the same steel and stone wretched and dominated, we   will harvest your bones and wheels and build a temple in your boiler 

And lay out a candlelit axel alter to pray for the violent and untimely Death of Robert E. Claymore

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