My silence is blank canvas
where strangers paint
cheerful sunsets and a cove 
where they anchor their boat
and stay a while

or they splash it 
with disapproving hues
and the haunted green
of the fears that possess them.

They spatter their fiction 
— their lives better than mine
or much worse — 
fancy comfort in a mute mirror
that reveals neither my colours
nor theirs, yet they believe
what they see.