On top of my horse I sit and see the world so far away. I ride with Jesse James and search the badlands for outlaws, to be one or to bring them down. With the wind I ride, chasing the Devil, I fight the Civil War. Indians wait around the bend to do me in. Dismounting into a world of mundane, a world of rent and bills a world of making ends meet. Into a world where I grow old and those I love go away. It’s a world in which no matter how hard I ride, I must return. This world pulls at you as it does me; try's to pull us into despair.
I sit in my chair and memories wash over me like waves on a beach, pounding and swirling then receding only to come again. The way it was, but will never be again assaults me again and again. Just the wind in my mind taking me down old winding roads that have no ends, to escape I go out to the pasture and pick out a horse.
He is a good one, a willing one who carries me like the wind as I run from myself into the oblivion of oneness with my mount. His heart is in the run he really wants to run, but I slow down to a canter, then to a trot to let him catch his breath and when he has his second wind we go again.
Hoofs pounding my heart fluttering like a young boy thinking of his first love. Lost to all but my horse’s breath, the rippling of his muscles as he stretches his body for his supreme effort to carry me into a world where there is only me and him. Into the night we ride as the day ends, changing gates to preserve his strength, we come to the end of the ride, and walk the last mile home. I take off his tack and turn him back to his world, and I go back to mine thinking, “I should have been a cowboy”, but at ride’s end I come back to what is, a bed I sleep in along with my dreams when they come.
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