The Chatner

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Please Accept My Application To Become A Bog Body

www.thechatner.com

Please Accept My Application To Become A Bog Body

Daniel Lavery
Mar 3, 2022
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Please Accept My Application To Become A Bog Body

www.thechatner.com

  • I’m always eating meals consisting of porridge with barley, flax, wild seeds, occasionally fish, etc

  • I bought a Seamus Heaney book at an airport bookstore sometime around the year 2000, I think it was his Beowulf translation

  • Man I’m just born to be in it (peat)

  • Salty air traveling over the Jutland wetlands from the North Sea would provide an ideal environment for the growth of peat, which eventually rots and produces a vinegar-like substance known as “bog acid” which would preserve my soft tissues like a lovely mango pickle

  • This would be good

  • Give me a cloak and leave me alone

  • Root me

  • Without natural drainage channels, conditions would be almost completely anaerobic, further inhibiting decomposition

  • Layers of compacted irregular mosses and debris known as sphagnum would envelop my body in a cold immobilizing matrix, additionally conserving any clothing or leather items you might want to toss in there with me

  • I could hang onto whatever you wanted to place in my hands or wrap carefully around my torso for pretty much an indefinite period of time, no problem

  • Put me in the slow swamp

  • I wouldn’t even mind

  • The big cold wet of ending

  • This is where we sift history and get time damp

  • This way if anyone wanted to look at my mild closed eyes in 8000 years it would be pretty straightforward to do so

  • Juice me up with it

  • Put a hoard in, push the the torch down

  • Sink me in the freeze-frame dirt and give me a moss hat and I’ll wait out whatever

  • Ring around me cows to sleep sweetly under flowers

  • Lock me in a cart, mirror-top, Jörðward

  • Cognate me a muckish riverbed, slow as rivers get, bottom out to toponymics

  • Drape me, lock me away, quiet me, drop me drop me into the sweet rich dirt-work of bog-kenning

  • Gauls know how to die

  • Muck me into shoe-leather for the long miry sweep

  • Bog is cellar-water for storing leeks, roots, torcs, hoards, barrows, chariots, for needsome later

  • For wait and slow down, for the unhurry spin cycle of locked-in marsh

  • Press me at the nice big world-cow Auðumbla for licking away rime until we reach the beef jerky of God

  • It’s the best resting here

  • It’s the rich churning of soil and skin til I’m soft as yogurt, tan as suede, happy little underground shoe rocketing under-down

  • Thanks in advance for put me there

  • [Image via]

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Please Accept My Application To Become A Bog Body

www.thechatner.com
3 Comments
catherine
paid
Mar 3, 2022

I've been thinking that I should write that essay about bog bodies that I've been thinking about for years...and now you've gone and done this, which is way better than anything I could ever do ;-)

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Lynn Wardley
paid
Mar 3, 2022

Best ever. The textures!

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