Uneventfully, Boots are Broken

The auctioneer’s daughter

Holds a closet off a seldom

Used stair

Where the West

Wastes away

A rough rider’s jacket,

The velveteen vestige of

A false virility,

Is holed and burrowed

By northern nesting

beetles,

Once of a rider

With deep

Bootleg drawl,

Now a floor mat for

Pornography and

Prohibition whiskey

A whip and tassel

Lay without conquest or

Object of omission,

Barbed fence

Ruined by the offense

Of time

The former armor of an

American conquistador,

It all remains

A molting face of

Brassed, bottlenecked skin,

Elasticized over mounds of

Animal skulls and

Antlers,

Chapped and chain-linked

Lips form a 

Smile, lined

With worthless coins

As canines

Her lethargic countenance 

A matted heap of

Buffalo hide and

Bullied breastplates,

Her eyes are

Splotchy, star-shaped

Spurs,

That stare,

Bugling, bloodshot

And rusty,

As she is strangled

By rope and line

Sundried supplications

Whistle through bolo ties

And broken arrows,

But their song is

Unreciprocated,

She is ill in

Isolation,

Wheezing and puckering,

Like a three-legged stallion,

She is but a

Festering destiny

This poem is inspired by the painting The Rustlers by American painter Ivan Albright. As these old relics of the West lay unpurchased and forgotten, time moves on and deteriorates our former notions of national greatness. With this decay, there is this a memory of this evil, the festering of

Manifest Destiny.