Dedicated to my mentor, the late Christopher Lane of Sedona Arizona, and founder of NORAZ Poets...

The horizon seems like a long ways from where these leather boots are standing.
Seems like a lifetime and a day
from this tumbleweed to the edge of the world.
Like a melody to a cowboy song
Caught up in the rising embers and crackling logs,
You ride across the sparkling night sky
As the guitar slowly
Sorrowfully
Plays
Just a little bit out of tune.

And when I roll into town like a thunderstorm,
I see you
from across the bar
With a shot of whiskey in between your index and thumb.

I can tell, stranger
You ain’t from around these parts.
That the rain that blessed your cowboy hat
Is from all across this open country.
That the horse you hitched outside the saloon
Has trodden over many fields
And prairies.
Rode over the mountains
And sunk down into canyons.
I can tell he’s carried you a long ways
For a long, long time.
He’s stood by your side like a soldier
But still
There’s a touch of loneliness that I can see
Stuffed into your back pocket like a handkerchief.

I can tell from the dust on your spurs
That you’ve been lonesome for a long while.
That you write letters
To the stars
Far too often
And believe in a god
That speaks in poetry.

Every scar tells its own story,
Stranger.
Every lost love
Every long night
Every time
Your lungs felt like the gallows
And every time you exhaled
Louder than the trumpets of judgment day.
Cowboy,
Show me that shotgun in your chest
That kept those bandits in your bloodstream from robbing your stagecoach heartbeat.
Gunslinger,
Show me those dusty tin stars in your teeth
And that polished silver Colt Peacemaker you kept
Locked and loaded at the bottom of your throat
Like a rattlesnake.
Tell me those stories
Spin some tails of the lawless lands you explored
The battles you fought
The lives you saved.

The lives you changed.

Pilgrim
You were made out of snakeskin and bullet casings
And poker chips and blood
And wagon wheels and typewriter keys.
Kicking up blackjack hands and buckshot
Behind you
Walking tall.
With a player piano in the bones of your spine
And a ribcage that swings open and close
Open and close
Like the rotting, splintering saloon doors.
And a heart
That was wild and untamed like a bronco
Furious and magnificent like a steam locomotive.
Stare at me
with those Mexican standoffs in your eyes.

Take me with you, cowboy
Take me off into the unknown
On the back of a horse with a desert monsoon in his hooves.
I will ride
Until my days fade away behind me
Like the land
Crawling away before the river
That rages and rips across the west like some kind of beautiful lightning bolt.
I will not leave your side
I will carry you
To red rocks and rushing water, cowboy.
And hold you like an angel does
Beneath a burning August sky.

So ride out into that sunset, drifter
On the back of a horse named Forever.
And don’t look back
Don’t you ever turn back.
And if you meet God out there on the frontier
You look him
Dead in his eyes
Like a Mexican standoff.
And you tell him
“I’m the new sheriff in town.
And there are gonna be some changes around here.”

Ride out into that sunset, cowboy
With a shadow
Taller than Clint Eastwood’s
And never look back.