A Round About Way To Get Here

I longed for those times when
the  word-slingers of the Wild West roamed
the last of the cowboys  
firing shots at your writes and how
they did
they didn’t
your format  
your cliches are so fucking cliche
brutal  
honest  
dressed in wit and banter
 
there was a desire to see the writing
honed to a razors edge
that they tested on their wrists
so they could use that blood as
the next write
 
where women scooped handfuls of lust
and painted words that took my breath away
they didn’t smear it on a page like
finger painting and call it art
 
I can still see remnants of the dust
and smell the blood beneath the  
incense
the stories carved by knife point in
the saloons back wall
the dice game cup still rattles an echo
of the ghosts preserved
 
wondering dark back alleys
in the detritus
panning for gold amongst the brackish water
I was shown your work
 
and you were a shotgun blast to the chest
kill of the decade….  
and it had been a decade since
you graced the last gunslingers saloon
I huffed the scent of you
that was left in the dusty times of DU’s graveyard
and wrote love letters in secret to a shadow  
I’d never met
 
I felt the wild call of you like a loon’s
cry in the break of dusk
the wild call of your dark femininity  
and the devouring light of your
hungering sex and I was enamoured
and lost in your audacity to fuck up the greats
with hidden meaning and messages that
felt like they were just for me
 
and so
when your name became the
next big thing that popped up in new poems
I ran out of my skin to have you
bringing hell and damnation and every  
bad decision I’d ever made hidden in  
a namesake that told you not to mind the gaps
 
I was already in love with you before
you knew I existed  
before my swinging dick caught your eye
the way a big-dick gets all the girls attention
 
I lost myself trying to woo you
and break old habits
torching everything in an inferno
the scars of which still litter the battlefield of  
want and need and destruction I/we paved
through the middle of the place we called home
 
we became a bomb blast in  
a densely populated area
leaving bodies and wounded strewn about
and I did what I always do
lost myself in anything but trying to deal
with the hell storm
 
only to slink back in later
with apologies and love letters
clasped in one hand and dynamite in the other
it was a shit show of  
shattered glass and quick draw words
and somehow we settled into a moment in the sun
it’s gorgeous
and the light is warm
 
your hand in mine as we dance a last dance
 
It makes me ache for what could have been
makes we wonder if
we’ll be snowed in  
as I head toward winter
and
you summer