Sharp, empty sky is a dread blue eye
looking at everything but you.
You feel like the only thing that exists, but really,
your'e the only thing here that doesn't.
The wind would rather talk to itself
than speak your breathless name.
You set out to build a fence
to prove to the dead sky that you exist
and oh, the building felt so good
that only once you'd finished the work
did you realize where you stood.
It is quiet on your side, a soundless expanse;
Are you proud, you languageless savage?
Does your silence feel like vindication?
Or does your heart start to tremble,
do your lungs start to burn,
when you look across the fenced and quartered plains
and see you've strung barbed wire across the only passage home?
There it broods familiar on the horizon, and must you stand removed
until it collapses, or will you bloody your pride to save it?
What's worse, being fenced in, or fenced out?
Terrified of both, terrified of it all, of the certainty and the uncertain,
of the loneliness and the companionship,
you set fire to the prairie, flee to the high mountains,
and hope that the sky sees you there.