The Cowboy Cantos
“It was my effort, in depicting the West, to depict it as it was.” - Buffalo Bill
I
Starry eyed fool, aloft barlights behind his eyelids and fundamentally alone. The grass was greener on the inside the surface of heaven on his pink cave eye breath from a face in his, meaner, with grave and worldly things in mind. He wanted money. Cough, cough. Money for a beer, already drank. Jim had a heart that anticipated Ford. His chest was a chasis awaiting combustion, stuck down the river, engineless, Penniless and out of Time. With wet legs in that puddle he was a cowboy. But cows could rustle themselves at this point, they followed the social contract, He couldn't be what he had to be and neither what he needed. "I said you owe me a short bit partner, are you deaf boy?" Behind his eyes were what he saw in the stars, purpose and potential in bodies afar, the Angels, demons and archons of plotted math Replacing birds in revealing his path Replacing women well before that Constellations made incisions in the menger spongecake of the possible (in space), from which an ooze of hateful circumstance bled (in time.) He opened his eyes and caught sense. Sense of the species. "Pardon me, Hoss, but I've got nothin' left. It went up with the mornin' smoke. To make clouds." And the barman didn't like that. If only a hundred years could go by, the Creole Samurai would be free of his code, with a gas pump, plastic bag or suit and tie, and free of everyone else's. The barlights blotted out the starlights in his mind.
II
She loved me enough to say it, but perhaps not enough to feel it. The night breathed with possibility. To Marlene I was nothing but nothing. To the nothing I was the edge of a something, finding freedom in my acts of inconsistent, inconsiderate chaos, til God caught up with me and everything went back to its right place. God through the medium of the Sheriff, through his giant Law arm, floating through people like Orion's belt in meat. What could be so wrong with that? "All part of the game, bro" said the shopkeeper via Western Union Telegram. I was outside his store watching horses and wagons and wind chimes and the whole heated plateau of the frontier buzz, watching bandits pass through town for the next like future WiFi packets, trafficking molecules of country, taking nothing but space in the air. If you weren't like them, a dangerous particle in the middle of nowhere, you were over there, where the dust kicks up a demon, and they exorcise them out the ground. An expanding pit, an inverse tower of babel, where shovel salesmen found the Apple of gold. What path lies before me, I want to make myself, and die there, with nobody else to keep the trail alive. What else is this country beggin' for? I'll make menace then lynch myself if I have to. Marlene set the fuse. I am in love with living. "Ay who told you to loiter?" came a shrillness a woman in a thin blouse hanging out the window above my head like a cloud, presumably the husband of the shopkeep and banker of his labours. I tilt my head up, see hers upside down, give her a raspy 'pology. "I'm sorry Ma'am." and her dead teeth didn't move an inch in grimace, she would shed no empathy for me, only vindication, which glistened down from the window like dandruff playing snowflakes or withered petals from an uproot stem. They landed indifferently on my face, like it was in the way. I moved away from the side of the store into the road, pretending I had a place to go. I have a gun but it only has two bullets. I have teeth and words, and I love lighting fires in peoples eyes. I can see how far that gets me. Bullets are expensive but dinner is always free. I can stretch out on the prairie like a cat, try and reach the cities with teeth and words. I might eat people.
III
"We don't have microplastics we just have sin. My washboard can't clean either." Small shoots of TNT plume somewhere else, smoke saplings still whisked their way around her feet, and crawled up her legs, hopin' to say hello to her brain. Everything around her was making its way there. "I have enmity to this thing that keeps me livin'." "Just how wrong am I?", a sincere quantitative beckon she lurches by the Hudson River, an extension of herself, exchanging water with the world. "Say hello to the other India!", she chimes as the dirty water goes back off. Like hair for a birds nest She drinks it back up and goes back to town to breath in the fumes of her living. How much world was left until it was all breathed up, and you could just about guarantee to have the next man on you when you touch or take a breath? Some amount, surely, despite it's fillin' up with gunpowder and bad manners and smoke? It's supposed a Chinese alchemist invented gunpowder in 800 AD by accident, while trying to find the secret to eternal life- To this day, birth rates still bloom during wartime. To be sure, the world ain't whimpering yet. Too big. But it can do, after all, the earth is just another animal in the hunt. It keeps trying to bury us in dust. It made death-masks of our faces with the wind finding every pore "it seems to be almost knee-deep in places", (Sarah Reymond Herndon, 1860) The world is covering us up, trying to make us go away If we stood still, it'd all be over "so why do I still feel invaded by myself when that dust chokes me up? Like it'll light on fire if you strike a flame. Like it smells funny. Like it comes from the same place as the gunpowder, and destined for it too." She had a bonnet and a balance between Lord and livin'. She was a drinkin' lass. She touched a few too many bits of the future, and in the soot and powder felt a time where you could cut yourself and bleed the World. She ate cereal outta dustbowls every morning with a fluoride stare Ahead of her time. She shrieks every time she sees a Tin shop "AAAH!!! RAYMOND!" she aint never knew a Raymond the bitch is crazy. Got the vapours. Smelled too many miasmas. The engine (her brain, a timely reference to the newfound train) packed up kaput. She let out some blood to see what was in there and it enriched that thinning frontier topsoil. She was a widow and her second husband was unfaithful, eventually she would kill a dog. The angels love her.
IV
Ain't nobody puttin' a bounty on this heart. It's a lonesome star, a roaming North star. Who wants my baby jesus Lady in the thin blouse, you love me? For the right money you love me? You ever read about Adam seperated into two beings, the man and the woman, and theyre in love? Like that? I'm lonely and my Richard's twitchin'
V
(Galloping sounds) btrbtrbtrgbtrbtrbgtrbgtrgbtrgbtrgbrtbgtrb dndnddndndndndndndndndndndnd NEIGH!!!!!!!!! (lasso sound) wshwshwshwshwsh fwoop MOO!!! (gun noise) PKOWW PKOWW PCKHOW!!! Gluglugluglug burp Yee haw! Gallopping (Train sound) Yippee kayayy (Spurs jangling sound) Bnchnk.. Bnchnk.. Bnchnk.. Bnchnk.. (racist conversation) (TNT going off) BOOM! (Praire dog noise) Yippee! (Insects) Buzzzzz (Cowboy spits) Spitttoo. (dust devils in the rising sun) (trimming the fringe of the frontier) (a people just as bad as the coyotes, everyone was animals then) “COWBOYS, just like the word says.” ― John Wayne
The companion album to these poems: