riding fences with a blank mind and a soulless disposition

riding fences with a blank mind and a soulless disposition

fiction
Edward w Pritchard


Sometimes its harder to be the one who stays home at the family homestead and tends to the business of life than to be the one who heads off West. West toward the Manifest destiny of loneliness.

Just ride fences with a blank mind and a soulless disposition. The sunsets drip with loneliness and  nights alone wake you at 3:07 AM cold from too much space in the bed and no tightness in the bedroll.

Riding fences fills up the gaps of eternity in the engine of time.  It's heavy work patching the fabric of the past with forgetfulness.

It takes a stout nature but the work is no chore. It's just what you do. Sometimes the Mind is blank but usually a melody drifts across the head but the words are gone. There's no one to dedicate a love song to and mysterious unmet strangers turn out to talk too much in the wrong voice spoiling the duet.

Stretch the arms wide and clutch the barbed wired fences toward together. Hold the nail between the teeth while you align two separated pieces of fencing so they meet but don't quite touch. Put a rusted crooked nail to hold things in place but forever apart with no compassion. Pound with one hand on the hammer while straining to hold onto to the other half of the fence tensely silent with stubborn resistance.

Watch the stars shoot across the sky the rest of the night. It's just rocky debris of unformed pieces of space process flashing brightly momentary across the vision of your forgiven awareness.