The Red Tar Kettle

Wearing bright safety vests, the county highway workers followed the scalding, red tar kettle as it pumped out liquid rubber bandages, thick as melted butter, to cover the pavement’s worst gashes. From above, it looked like the flip side of skywriting — as if yellow cursors on the ground were carefully spelling out a message for unseen readers in the clouds.
Patricia Cohen. NYT.

The unseen auditors in the sky.
They know.
They know the red tar kettle will keep them au courant. 
They don't care that the molten tar, an evil molasses,
scalds our hands and arms.
Permeates our work clothes with the stink of corrupted fossils.
Visits our brains with hydrocarbons, trashing memory.
Fingernails a permanent dull black.
Teeth twisted like old boneyard tombstones.
Shrinking ears.
Mice in our hair. What's left of it.
Our lungs are now thick waffles.

Down with the cloudy elite!
Down with the red tar kettle!
Spill it into the ditch. 
Sorry, tadpoles . . . 
But revolution scorches many until it can burn
 clean and pure.
We take to the tar smeared streets.
Our boots burning with rage.
Stomp out all the writing. Mess it around.
Make the inscrutable readers in the clouds
as ignorant as we are!

Who are they? Where did they come from?
Why put them in charge?
When will they come down to our level?
I know just this:
When I was a child they came bearing gifts.
Yardsticks made of candy.
Talking feathers.
Walter Cronkite dolls.
Hats that kept out the sorrow.
Flying light bulbs. 
A machine that turned hiccups into potable water.
All they asked in return was a home in our clouds, and the daily news spelled out in tar on rural roads.
Governments said sure, no problem.
But they gave the actual grunt work to me and my like.
Made us quit our cushy office jobs, leave our homes and families, and travel up and down two lane asphalt roads 
with a steaming kettle of tar. 
No days off.
Bad food.
Limited access to Netflix.
Attacked by owls and woodchucks.
And for many long years, we took it.
We bowed our heads and took it.

But no more.
The smell of cold puddles of tar is the smell of freedom.
And what did the aloof cloud dwellers do about it?
They killed all the birds and made bumble bees as large 
as cats.
Then they left.
So now we live in a world
of bright safety vests
and lots of calamine lotion.
But we are free and happy.
At least . . . I'm free and happy.
Sometimes.
But not often.