There is a dent in the last seat of my brown sectional,
the result of an ingenuous act of two concave halves of my posterior
digging into it for hours on end.

I call it sitting
The trolls call it couching, lazy-ing, bumming.

It wasn’t easy to give shape to that last cushion
What did it, was years of painstaking long hours of kneading into it.
Angling my sitzfleisch (German for buttocks) in the center with the determination only a procrastinator possesses.

It is not that I don’t do anything.
For it is from this throne that I pass decrees, “thou shall not stay out late.”
It is my sanctum of reflection, of others.

This is the place where my intricate thoughts undergo slow mulling and become potent.
Beating upon someone like a a plucky barbarian or blessing another like a benevolent saint.
Every evening, I hear the trolls cry out loud.
“Get up, get up!
come, the dinner table, the dirty dishes,
the unattended mail,
mending and trimming,
dust covered paintings,
wrinkled clothes and dirty underwear,
open jars and tangled wires,
matted hair and drying eyes.
Evening upon evening, they are calling.
I can’t I can’t! My thoughts are gushing
the senseless mass shootings, climate change policies,
The drug overdose, the texting accident.
Evening upon evening,
The dent grows deeper,
my thoughts grow wilder,
the trolls grow bolder.
One brings the basket of unfolded clothes,
Another a dust pan,
A paper rocks hits my shoulder,
I shift my weight,
The springs creak,
Get up Get up!

I say the night is young,
The fireflies aren’t yet wooing each other,
I don’t hear the crickets yet,
The dent that I have carved
The depression that I have forged
Etches a deeper one in my mind.