We Make Mud

We Make Mud: Revisited

We run around town, with mud in our buckets, and cover our whole town up with mud. When the town men and town women come up to us brothers to ask us what do we think we are doing, what us brothers do is, we cover up with mud their wide open mouths shut up. The mud in their mouths, this shuts them up good, this keeps them from asking us brothers what is, to us, a question too stupid of them to be asking. What we are doing — isn’t it out in the open, what we are doing? You don’t even need eyes in the back of your head to see what it is we are doing. What we are doing is, we are making our town, this dirty river town, we are turning this town back to what it was — back in the beginning, back when all things were made out of mud. Us brothers, we get our mud, we make our mud, down by the muddy river, down where water and dirt meet to make mud. The muddy river is where we come running down to it to fill up our buckets when our buckets are in need of more mud. What we do then is, we run back up through town and run our muddy hands over whatever our eyes can see: houses and churches, bars and donut shops, liquor stores and hardware stores and the building where, inside, the sheriff, it seems to us, he is always sleeping. Inside these town places, the towns people of this town, they stare out at us brothers with a look that says, look what those boys are doing. Us brothers, we look back with a look that says, look again: this is what we are doing. And with our hands dripping with mud and with more mud, we cover them up with mud. We do not stop this covering up, us brothers, we cannot stop mudding it up, not until all of this dirty river town is good and muddy with mud covered up. We build humpbacked hills of mud where once there stood rows upon rows of single-storied houses. And if you look over there, up the river a bit, upriver from where the black husk of the steel mill sits shipwrecked in the mud, this is where, us brothers, we make us a mountain made out of mud. The mill too, us brothers, we cover it up with mud, so that only the rusted tops of the smokestacks can be seen up from the mud sticking up. These smokestacked tops, they are our town’s clocktower steeples where, us brothers, we climb up with our muddy buckets dangling empty from our fists, our hands hanging hammerless, our faces gazing up at a mud-colored moon that is half made out of light, that is half made out of mud, until us brothers reach up with our hands, we push up on our toes, and turn out the light.