As a child I ate mud. It tasted of grit and peat and wild churning and something I could never find a name for. Later I became a moongazer always squinting through windows, believing freedom was aerial until I figured that the moon was a likely mud-gazer longing for the thick sludge of gravity, the promiscuous thrill of touch, the licence to make, break, remake, and so I uncovered the old role of poets – to be messengers between moon and mud – and began to learn the many languages of earth that have nothing to do with nations and atlases and everything to do with the ways of earwigs, the
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