I know you're tired from your
job, feet and mouth tired from
chasing tips
but you still make that smile
cut like a wound from your lips,
insisting on us dancing in the kitchen
like in the movies
you watched as a little kid.
You tell me that your favorite movies to watch
with your dad before he heard
were the cowboy ones,
the ones with the ugly men and pretty girls,
that God was a man on horseback with a gun,
riding into the sun,
back turned.
Things don't ever get better, only easier to endure
and we learn how to get it to not hurt quite as bad anymore.
You ask me if I still remember how to play the guitar
like in the scene where Marilyn plays for the men in the bar.
We could save up for an instrument but we need to buy a car
but I promise to call her, 'No Return.'
You ask me if love will ever stop being enough
and I laugh and say it hasn't happened yet.
All the lies in the world between our jagged breaths.
Your feet are tired from running and chasing things
that don't exist,
that ghost of the cowboy in the sunset.
I love you,
my cowboy,
always riding perpetually to the west.
