Gob of Mud

Among the popular topics
Publications have forbidden:
The evolution of language
And the wreck of the Titanic.

Not that anyone stops trying
To write about the forbidden.
Too popular or too wicked,
Writing itself is temptation,

Each effort at composition
Driven by desires to attempt
Things unattempted yet in words,
Although we know they've all been tried.

There's always possibility,
Angles concealed in blank spaces;
There's always a revolution,
An injustice, an untold tale.

The combinatorics of words
Are infinite, of narrative
Infinite upon infinite.
Oh, what the hell. Here's this blue-eyed,

Round-headed, waddle-legged toddler
Bringing me fistfuls of wet mud
To accept, examine, approve.
No, no, no. No more mud, I say.

But still she trundles down the porch
And gathers more mud in the shade
And trundles back, wet, squished fists clenched
To offer me more, quite convinced,

By herself, or by me somehow,
Or by heaven knows what command
Come down the long generations,
That the right gob of mud will work.