A person would go to the box, lift the small silver curtain
and put their head in the box and tell their personal stories,
their dreams, desires, fears and hopes,
they spoke all of the things they could
never speak of to each other.

After the last person, the magician closed up shop
and was seen riding out of town.

A person approached and said,
“Why are you leaving with all our secrets”?

The magician said,
“You don’t need them anymore; they are told.”

The people gathered and exclaimed their disbelief at the ruse,
and shouted expletives about the magician.
They also began telling each other some of what they
whispered in the box, their dreams, their fancies,
their fears of their deaths, their darkest worries.

They talked so much, they talked through the night.

The next morning, for the first time in a long time,
the people awoke and realized they had nothing left to say
and instead asked, turned to their
neighbor, family, friend, lover, and asked,
“what are you thinking about?”

Another version of this story was written in 1998/99.