Happy Birthday, Billy the Kid
(November 23, 1859 - July 14, 1881)
It'll be in the sixties, sunny, later today
near your Fort Sumner grave....
Tourists' salty tears will splat dry ground.
They've seen the movie. Or all the movies.
There's always someone who believes
he bought one of your boots or a tooth.
So much of the past is crippled memory
blackened from bitterness or for profit.
Postcards a dollar, knock-off Billy sombrero
with a Chinese dog skin vest? Ninety-nine bucks.
Oh, the turns of reckless, hungry youth,
girls and borders, pistolero nights... cantina songs:
we live with deaf ears for the smell of gunpowder.
All too often the law is a bent-back whorish lie.
This poem for Billy the Kid, and other bio-sketch poems, are included in Ghosts & Birthdays, a book of Red Shuttleworth poems published by Humanitas Media Publishing in 2012... available on Amazon.