The Last Cowboy
a small autobiography
on the day I bought leather boots,
wore my leather jacket near the mirror
and didn’t play it safe even under all
that dead skin made pretty
So the biggest-of-all time hurricane set to smash Mexico,
it’s been downgraded to a “tropical depression”—me too.
Last night in Boston the cracked hand-in-deep-stuffed-pocket
chills came howling down from the haunting Canadian Alps
past the glooming doom-stricken upper burbs of Boston town
to blow clean and dead like the sand-blasted surface of the
green ungrinning moon the famous barebone streets of Boston
proper which the original daddies of this country had to toss their
paper umbrellas and fold forever their lawn chairs to huddle
holster-to-holster and come up with “oh well now that we can’t
play in the yard I guess we aughtta invent liberty : hey whadda say
Jeff, Benny, Ham, Slim Jack Johnson and The Ramblers?”
I am standing like a tragic James Dean type and my left foot,
I left it crushed between the brake pedal and the clutch.
I’m looking out at the thick night which conceals things like
poison shivs, parties, brained rats and the spooky breath of vampires.
I am thinking about the variety of human life. Socks do little
for me. Lollypops cannot be depended on. And the layer
like stone dust of junky symbolism that snores rancid on each object
I inflict on my eyes makes heavy sneezes like Howitzer shots.
I’m a great kaleidoscope as well as a pair of windup lips :
a photographer and a poet, a farmer and a practice clown.
Listen to me speak : the “obfuscation” of the “visual plane”
in my picture is the “aesthetically good” confusing “neighbor”
of the “slang-drivel” in the “grammatical defenestrations”
of my past “experiments in the expedience of thought.”
Language is a funny thing but it is not a joke until you crack it…
Why am I standing? Action is a outdated scare that lives in my muscles
like a “You’re dead” from John Wayne a.k.a. Genghis Khan :
it knocks like a bone’s rattle when news arrives of gunslinging
or wooing or circus heroics… I am only standing : not moving,
my hand is on my hip but I have no weapon. I only wanna look
good… Hold the pose. My lips are red. My hair is classic.
My clothes, my body parts, the steel bible in my chest pocket
to catch a bullet and make a miracle : I am the last cowboy.
I’ll walk out, clinking with bells and belt buckles and quarters—
I’ll go into plains, the chill will roll over me but my organs
will have grown hard like blisters and I’ll win : I’ll kiss everybody
and lay all my enemies low. I’ll be very cool. The wind’s picking up…
The Last Cowboy doesn’t wear a hat he looks and looks and
in order to have the appearance of sophistication and depth
he puts the gloomy ocean of sadness in his eyes as their sparkle
when he looks at you, right—ha ha haha haha ha hahaha haw ha ha.
