she looks at me

dark hair runs down the corridor of her shoulder, still warm from the last shot of whiskey, her words stop me cold:

"You know big fella.. when your belly is full and your lust is emptied, when malt dances in and out of that coastline you call a brain.. you can pull down your awnings.. but it won't change the stock in the store.."

I was married once, but like the frontiers men of old, I failed to find any tracks in the female heart.. a might too wild for settled living, and a might crazy for thinking same, left me a man of casual arrangement with the fairer sex, and that suited both parties just fine.

I'm telling you the water is wet, because that's just the way it is. What you do with such information, I don't rightly care. I'm setting the road for my own horse.

The trail is hard, brutal. It sculpts rigor on you. You learn fast or die. Sometimes, folk learn fast AND die. I never claimed life was fair.. "fair" is a made up word, designed to take the edges off.. just as you need an edge.. to make it past something.

I caught a glimpse once of what God might have seen as I crested a hill.. and watched below a mass of wagon and beast, weave a dark score on the trail.

regular wages, to me.. was a mortgage I could never accept..

you did a job.. you saw it through to the end.. you got a lump sum.. and you moved on..

food tasted better, the colours changed, women wore new smiles.. and memory slept in the last place.

I hobble tie the horse and make a fire..

A coyote fights the moon.. he seems to know a horrible truth that none of us has figured out yet

I think of all the great women I've known.. the ones that furnish my memories..

the kiss from an unexpected beauty that soars over all that offered you everything..

I dream. Not always bad. Sometimes I smile an unconscious smile..

I dream..
that in all this death
in all this darkness
in all this hardship..

there's a flower growing in a place no earthly flower should grow..

and when I get to it, it will smell like her kiss tasted..