Ezines

Offerings!

Laughing Sun
C/Oasis

---

Original Work! 

Political Meditations
Billboard
Current events

Resources!

Classifieds
Jobs!

[THE MUD HUT DIALOGS]

No doubt the Mud Hut saw its eccentricities and necessities in the century where all were happy, prosperous, well-rounded, educated, playfully executing desires with the new instruments.

Cold days passed quickly. The trees were a bestiary of delight. “Let us flock to the Mud Hut where the poet lives,” the beasts seem to say.

He welcomed them all, family, friends, acquaintances, workers, agents and so forth. The Mud Hut was peaceful and only hinted from time to time discordance, even malefaction. They would come, they would go with hardly a trace of them marking the poet who watched everything in a fascinated gaze as though it weren’t real, as though it all popped out of a storybook; the kind his uncle had gotten him as a kid where the story popped up out of the page and talked to him. Misguided ones would pull him aside and say, “But don’t you see how punished you are!” Well, he thought, if this is punishment then I have been treated well by the punishing gods. They did not have faith, that was the problem. They had been granulated into a kind of bitter charcoal that neither comprehended the world or admitted the limitation of knowing it. Odd, he thought, what bitterness passes through these people!

And when it was apparent they didn’t really care for the things he did or believed in he began to shut them out; he no longer trusted their happy natures. “They only want a stupid reflection of themselves. So much for all the education and travel they’ve done!”

A few of the treacherous women had tried to make his life miserable and he made it more miserable by trying to understand the depths of their own misery and why they would be treacherous.

Men, stamped by the rigors of corporate life did not like what they saw. He laughed. “Much is cut off from this type of person no matter how many things they end up owning.”

The truth was that the Mud Hut made no sense without the poet residing in it. Without the poet the Mud Hut was mere darkness lit up occasionally with drunken revels. The poet had come and marked the center of the Earth’s axis through the patio where the squirrels played. This is where he stood to watch Venus and the Moon eye each other. This is where he demanded the music of masters. That itself had driven most of the riff raff away.

A hollow and shallow bunch made a lot of noise that disappeared fast enough.

“I didn’t come here to work in your labs or colleges. I came here to contemplate and to be with my God. I came here to answer the riddles I was given in my mid-20’s. I came here to study and think.”

He became increasingly intolerant of those who didn’t do any of those things but who demanded the poet do the same things as they did.

“Well,” they said huffy and bemused at the same moment, “we live and are in the middle of lives.”