Tonight's Poet Corner: Mud Clot

Mud Clot
by Belinda Roddie

It's when the earth has a
heart attack, shaking at its
cardiovascular core - the throttling of a
piss-poor motor as the sludge seeps in and
freezes up everything - gears, buttons, little
circuits leading the
electrical cavalry to healthier days.

You drink a chocolate shake, and they
tell you that you'll die from it, and the mud
leaks from your pores thick and clotted,
like the sweat of Mother Nature as she
suffers a grainy miscarriage,
wooded crib
abandoned by the pine-needled tears
on the back of her eyes.

Don't hold out for a cure, because there
is none - not for you, anyway.
Nature has a way of sewing
stitches, icing the injury even when it's
melted away. When we are all dead and
gone from cardiac arrest, the coronary
artery of this fleshy orb will be un-
plugged, and the plaque will drain away,
like pus
in an infected wound.