trudging across one-way trails
burnt into red copper hills
descending into another dried up wash,
Jacob came upon his distant destiny:
an abandoned ghost town
done up just right
by its now departed proselytizing Sabbath gorgers
he saw had been dealt marked cards, open faced,
forming the last epitaph for Tombstone gold miners
wasted away long ago along thirsty forsaken silver-dust trails
could such a place provide refuge for this wandering desperado
who'd blasted open the remaining jail cells after making his
getaway,
who'd held up
whorehouse tea party patrons filled with priests and diplomats,
who'd denounced the
town's God-fearing glory-be horse traders on The Tombstone Epitaph's front page,
and who'd first posed as a rainmaker causing flood waters to
overrun the town's streets and alleyways
“the schedules already been writ”, declared Jacob,
"these dog-hollering Chirstian fakers are now tucked away
forever
beneath sunburnned gorges
straight into mule hoofprinted hills"
so off rode Jacob clear into southwestern history...
now in these current monsoonless summers
Tombstone townsfolk gossip and boast about those long-ago good
hard rains
that wiped out the already flooded streets,
townspeople who
reminisce about those union busters shedding their last wet coats
and miners shitting in outhouses reading magazines being swept
away by unforgiving currents,
townsfolk now crowded under rotting moldy wooden doorways
babbling tales of lost and found runaways,
their worn bootheels shuffling over hot loose concrete pebbles,
their makeshift red parched coveralls
hidden in closets dripping,
residents gazing over their streets now wounded with sweltering
tar and animal bones
and decimated hills begging any damaged coyote for just a
solitary lick,
this godforsaken place where the Tombstone Chamber of Commerce
has withered into an unlatched rusted key
unable to unlock that long gone stranger’s hotel room
all this days on while 23 miles to the east newcomers over in
Bisbee proffer:
are these border walls built to separate us from them
or there to remind us of karmic justice?
Bisbee, 9/11/73