Jeffry Jensen

THE GALLOPING WESTERN DELUSION

The chew of tobacco did not do the trick.

Blood kept gurgling out of the hole in his shoulder.

It was the Kid who trembled into the darkness.

Just another outlaw from Coffeyville was all that was mumbled

by the best and the brightest of Lincoln County.

Garrett came out of his bedroom with gunpowder on his britches.

No one could blame the stars for turning pale pink at midnight.

The Indian Territory was growing restless with the influx of saloon dwellers.

A shuffling specter of marked cards and greasy fingers pulled on the weekend.

Barely nine and going on twenty, the Kid boomed

into a mining camp boarding house with a manner befitting a tarnished spirit.

Camp Bowie was gorging on plunder and armed immigrants.

Nothing could be resolved by trading for diseased blankets.

We all lived with aliases in daylight and reveled like savages in heat.

I took refuge on a parleyed ledge of doom and snapped my neck

out of joint before the Apache ponies could circle the moon.