Outside of Town   This is what freedom looks like — little dump on the prairie. Thirty years of my crap, your crap. Busted trailers, busted trucks, some piles of scrap wood, two rusted-out cars, Japanese and Detroit, too — and who the hell are you to give a doodly damn? When I got here, there was nobody — just the smell of sweetgrass and sage, enough sun to fry your brains and enough wind to blow em clean out of your head, and winter nights to freeze the nuts off a brass bull. One month of green if you’re lucky, blizzards in June, and please just leave me alone. The whole goddamn town’s out here now, with their fences and their lawns, their dogs, their dishes — Saturday night cowboys with their three-acre ranchitos, beach-bronze complexions. They don’t like how I live. Fair enough. I don’t like them, either — strangers. But why sic the county on me, give me shit? Why does everything have to change?                                                                  for Bill     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont August 2012