Let the lulling beckon and sing, O Death-thy sword aflame, the screeching echoes of a hungry night scale the walls that flatten under foot; Mounted on horseback my gaze in a daze amid slightly shifting pine trees inclining at the back of a slumbering lion, star-arrayed and in full display, a nocturnal ballet whilst a thousand organs play- their mouths covered by hands who sternly demand reverence unstained. The heavens sway to my horse’s neigh and the creaking of the saddle and its tack, anchors me aback-resisting the vulgar desire of the vacuum’s witching attire. The sound of its mouth ajar, its scent of blood and honey-bees and wolves, foxes, coyotes, cicada roads of ants aplenty.  Calling this cowboy to a land-one far too far from infernal and heavenly paradigms to understand.

The cold of Forge’s breath, coils upwards, ascending its way into the mountain depths; Sweat dripping down his heaving chest. Blood reins held upon my left, and right hand rests upon the horn with palm and fingers enthroned upon the crest. He snorts and bellows as the late hour spell goes. And we sit in magic company, perfumed with nature’s reverie, with ardent thoughts adrift-the revenant-a man who took flesh and carved his mark bit by bit. But now here he sits-atop a Quarterhorse -the cowboy’s war machine, the vessel of Indian fever dreams, the missing half of my heart’s moaning aches.

With three fractured nagging ribs, I resist…the singing of temptation’s urge to send me in a gallop. And I cannot help but notice how the more things change, the more they truly stay the same; Bakersfield and it’s streets did allow me to retreat in many ways, of one discreet, and hide the face of better days as its natives turned a cold and bitter cheek.

 

C’mon, ol’ boy, stay straight and through

Find your feet-firm agrip the avenue

Let the fangs of feral hills find you fondly

Of this thrashing and bruised lessons foreshadowed I do concede

To wrangle death-baroqued dragon upon my chest-breastplate beaming

 

Let any Cayuse come forth with challenge of abuse

And let her whisper somewhere far beyond the trees

‘L’appel du vide’

 

∞