Ghost Dance Shirt Was My Raincoat

I believe that I could like myself in October if only I could play a silver dagger fiddle. I don’t have nothing to do today but to cut wood on a Monday? And without saw gas I’m treading hours. Gray day this day outside has me gray. I don’t know what to say except that I want my saddle out of the barn and dusted off and placed on the back of a spotted horse that knows the bottom of this canyon.  I’m in a canyon. Drivin by myself into a black rock place of basalt battlefields. I blow my trumpet to, - Death? and only laugh when his army prances onto the soggy rain bitterbrush field. 

Grim Reaper blues. I don’t mind so much but I never used my blue sky day to learn to play my fiddle, that scroll necked fiddle that still looks up at me with expectation  and dread that I will never coax

he song within it that It wants to write with me. I don’t see, but blackly I agree that I’m just imagining the fiddles release from silence. Rather that Lord Jim fiddle only knows that it will picked up by a player and sung to after I’m gone, with or without MY song.  I didn’t see nothin’, but The Snake River is black where It aint blue and salmon die with spawning done and nothing left to do, but let me be a Steelhead on a second round to the sea, with the essence of life I agree, let my seed and song and memory be white hot without winter, until the dead flowers bloom and the sky for all intents and purpose becomes a corral for eternity. My skies are fenced just like the earth and like a long drive cowpuncher of the golden aspen days, let fences disappear like the buffalo did and let the buffalo come back in their place. I put on a Ghost shirt against the rain of this day, and Deaths regiment, and dance in a circle the long and scenic route back to my pickup truck. My hands want to be capable of work and not just wasted time. My mind, a stranger ever since it left my heart, reaches for a flint arrow, and missing that takes up a Bible and opens it to a verse of round rebuke. I sing this like the Crows did at Little Big Horn to the riders of death who watch me and sit slumped and stupid silent upon, their night horses, and are leading-333- what’s that- a spotted horse for me to ride? Hell I just meant to Montana from Hells canyon , or maybe Nevada, just cuz its bin awhile, but how do I know that those riders aint headin for a peaceful valley of smoking lodges and buffalo meat hanging from a rack with the laughter of all my friends guarding it? My spine tells me that I better fight, and I aim my Bible like a drunk with an empty bottle instead of strait like a gabardine gunfighter, and then I spit. He and his cronies are just ridin’ by today, leaving my with the gray sky day, and the black river that’s only a state line Oregon solution in a black coffee way. Maybe I ought to quit wasting time.