Cowboy

Tom Hunley

In the first draft of this sentence, you weren’t in it,
and neither was I, but then I put you in
and I put myself in, and I moved us into a suite,
and I went all in and had us touch, which is why
I love writing: because I love to revise,
because yesterday a barista said Come again
and I said you too which I didn’t mean –
certainly not as some sexual innuendo
which I couldn’t revise because I’d spoken it
and my mouth has no eraser, no delete key,

and the barista goes home, tired, socks soaked,
espresso machine still whirring in his head,
and he kisses his girlfriend, their nose rings
clapping together and the girlfriend asks
about the barista’s day as he cracks open an IPA
and says Some customer told me to come again
and I almost laughed in his face
but you know, the customer is always right,
so I just smiled like an ass
and she laughs and he laughs, and all of this
happens vividly in my imagination
where I’m all alone like Travis Bickel
talking to his mirror in Taxi Driver,
cracking like a mirror might crack, though

in reality you’re right beside me on our love seat
whereas in my imagination you may as well
be a boat and I may as well be the Sahara
because we’re so far apart like I’m a boner
and you’re a nun or like I’m a red wheelbarrow
trying hard to be as red wheelbarrow as red wheelbarrow can be
but all these literary critics and high school teachers
have frightened all the white chickens
and sentenced me to live in some stupid poem
that you read once and forgot forever
and so my imagination gives me a sentence
in which a bird gives another bird a worm,
the only worm around for miles, but I delete it 

because what I mean is one set of footprints
on fresh snow and that leads me back to myself
and stepping into my own body means stepping
into my longing for your body, loneliness
eating at me like time eating a calendar
and so I add a big bonfire to the sentence and it melts
the snow and the distance between us until you trot
into the sentence, right up to me like a runaway mare
come back to a cowboy, and I always imagined myself
as some kind of cowboy.

Tom C. Hunley won the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize for Adjusting to the Lights. In 2021, C&R Press released What Feels Like Love: New and Selected Poems. Tom directs the MFA Creative Writing program at Western Kentucky University, where he has taught since 2003.