I Want

I want to feel better.
I want my eyes to only ache because there is dust in them.
I want to cough on branding smoke instead of exhaust fumes.
I want to see the land sprawled out and painted like a canvas map for my horse's hooves to roam.
I want to smell horse sweat and feel beads of it running down my face.
I miss seeing hooves slinging dirt across acres after a renegade heifer.
I haven't forgotten the feeling of turning a cow on the fence.
I haven't forgotten the pride which is in long manes and mustache knotted tails.
I want sage brush to buff against my legs and I want the sun to burn hot on my chaps.
I want wooden heeled boots puffing at the dusty desert's heart.
I want spring water on my lips and saddle pads that know nothing of being dry.
I want my hands to be cracked and bruised.
I want to hear a diesel engine growl into the morning darkness and I want to hear your voice in the old wooden tack shed.
I want to hold your callused hand.
I would cry your name into the desert if you weren't here.
I want to know better the minds of horses.
I want the tops of my hands to be red and my muscles aching.
I want my spurs to be rusted and know the hides of many horses.
I want my favorite color to be spring.
I want my horn wrap to be glassed over and blue.
I want my ropes to be melted and frayed and my boots and saddle to tell more stories than my lips.
I want the brim of my hat to shade my green eyes and I want that palm leaf almost worn through.
I want to know the country side, to know every canyon and every spring.
I want to doctor calves in the moonlight.
I want to become alike my role model.
I want the pages of my bible to look like they've been through hell.
I want to see my sister's braid dangling by her cantle bind.
I want my hands to have shaped words upon paper.
I want my heart to know God better.
I want to thrive in this heaven on earth.
I want to watch it play out through the tall desert grass fresh dewed by midnight's rain.

~Gussie

Fairytales

If I knew how I felt, I'd tell you. I really would;
But the music is too loud and my thought process is blurry.
Blurry all but Jesus and horses.
That's what stands at the end of my tunnel vision.
The sides are littered with handsome smiles and cowboys and ropes, you and the books I read last month.
They just fade in and out of perspective;
one minute in a state of perfection, the next a repetition of last night's terrors.
It's agonizing, the way it all whirls around like the hurricane that it is.
At the same instance, it has a sense of allure and charm, kind of like you.
The curtain falls each night like the end of a scene when the actors drop their masks and their faces beheld.
Acting starts in strife for perfection and ends in habit.
You become your mind's best self meanwhile destroying the originality and loveliness of who you genuinely are.
Truth be known, I've been acting for a while and I'm trying to learn how to act like me again.
Stop acting, I beg you.
Your dreams that lie each night on the dark side of your eyelids, listen to them. They are the prettiest things.
Now do you see?
It's obvious that if I knew how I felt, I'd tell you, I really would, but I can't even keep my nightmares and fairytales straight.

photo cred: google