Lone Star Stranger
Eurasians can be cowboys, after all.
We can be stallions, chestnut mares, horses standing tall.
Even centaurs; just ask my first abuser.
I have taken every kind of fall
out of the saddle, and not broken a single bone
in my own body. I can’t speak for other people’s skeletons, but they do have a fairly poor
showing of them, in their psycholocal museums:
their closets are so filled to the brim with rags and riches, that floor
to floor, the world is
completely empty.
When I come riding in with Destiny
there’s no one even to meet us,
much less try to fight us or beat us,
or make us feel small.
Howdy partner.
Like Orville Peck, my own masks are made of what I believe is in store
for me: massacres, and nightmares, and apocalypses
that rightfully so, dot the barren landscape. More and more
I worry that I have not done the right thing,
by leaving every last one of my weapons at the door
to this latest version of Westworld.
But then, I am implored
by those who love me, equally as righteously,
that I am everything that they want in a brown Kristang captain of industry.
That when they need me, they’ll send for me,
and I’ll keep coming back to every last battle and war
that ends in misery:
I think you didn’t know that Kristang cowboys also can time travel.
Let’s go back to where it all began:
the outskirts of spacetime, and the true beginnings of humankind,
when you and I first began to sing of this doleful, dusty allegory.
No stranger to fear?
Nah.
I’m every man’s secret, glowing, irradiated history:
the thief of time,
the legend of Kevin Martens Wrong and Right.
The huge, fucking Kristang bronco of muscular, resplendent immensity.