text: Their silence kills me, The dead gaze in their eyes. Do they live timidly? Have they drank their minds away? I once knew them, but then I left home for awhile. Loving and burning my way through my youth. I returned home an older man, they saw this themselves amongst their own wrinkled face. No parade, no song, and no kisses. Without response at my every effort for a fresh “Hello”, it tires my heart. Always amongst themselves in the wood line, their little tribe encircles all of me aside from my small vein to the rest of the world. Watchful eyes peer onto me, like knives into my skin. They do not utter a word, no dare to toss a stone, never a finger to leave their side. In my dreams they feast and dance on my grass under the full moon, I’m no where to be found I dread that I am the fire burning. Maybe these are nightmares, note to self, less wine before bed. Day by day I tend to my humble cabin, Without a woman’s touch i make a rough apple tart from the grains I grow and the apples that fall from wood line. I dare not pick what has not fallen in my respects. I attempt to look for someone as I near the border of our existence. “Hello?!” But not a breath exchanged. I walk the apples home to be sorted. Painting most days with my lunch, making new colors from ground up flowers and brushes from various rodents donated by my lovely feline. As I finish each canvas I leave it out for a full day in hopes for a response. Nothing. Slander me at least! But no, they leave me unbothered. It hurts the art. Yet one after the other I continue. I obsessed to evoke them, beginning to kill my own rodents as I frayed my brushes to their ends. Yanking fistfuls of roots, a massacre of wildflowers in the summer sun. I had finished my stock of wine before the solstice nearly sleeping on the hill each night. My hands now raw and blistered from the craft and sun, I struggled to make my final stroke dropping the worn brush off the edge of the hill. Unable to walk the distance home, I had my mule drag me on a slip of leather with a rope harnessed to his shoulders. I hugged my tools inside my arms watching the canvas disappear from sight, my boots dragging through the grass. I grinned with content at the marvel of my final piece. My tools were retired in a hole, burned with a bottle of my cheapest spirit, pulling from the bottle before it was gone. The fire kept my chest warm against the cold summer night. I looked for anyone peeking at the art but not a soul to be found. I stood up dropping my bathrobe from my shoulders. I took a step into flame until pulled back down to the ground. A woman with dark hair and eyes knelt next to me. Her hair had been up, but she let it down, the hair falling at her breast’s. On my chest she laid my brush from before. With a single finger she stopped me from uttering a thank you. She rolled me back up in my robe and held me as we watched the fire burn through the full moons glow. Song and dance echoed from the wood line, plumes of smoke whisked away in the wind. I cried myself to sleep like a little boy against her warm breast. By morning she had gone. Nothing but a drunken dream, fooling myself. I rode my mule across the pasture to the edge of my hill. The easel erect but naked without the canvas. I braved a brief ride into the wood line only to find it barren and deserted, as if the soil was unbothered. I rode through the pasture in tears once more, the easel in my left arm. The tears were of joy. An emotion had finally been stirred in them. I had been released. No more shackles on my mind. No more silence as the wind spoke to the drums in my ears. No more of there ego. All holds have disappeared. I was ready to leave once again, and so the mule carried me out onto the road where I cut him loose slapping his large rear towards home. Stuck out my thumb against the horizon and hitched a truck bed outward bound to let loose once more. It helps the art.