Cowboy in Pink

Picture a man in black & white

fingering his thirty-aut-six

locked and loaded, his penis

protruding from lace pink panties.

The color I cannot be certain of

though shades of grey break

clean from monochrome rules–

the boots, (brown?) Durangoes,

his hat, a (dirty black?) Stetson,

is cocked slightly back.

Picture too, a frame if you can,

 

a border around the old west,

looking back from a sunset

sky gone to seed– the hull of it

purple and round, the center

a deep ponderosa gold,

ember orange at its core–

and a ranch, say a place

with a thousand or more working

acres pulled tightly around itself

like a broad cut of trade cloth

 

the frame with its stripes of green

stripes of brown; timber we’ll call it,

as it’s done in Montana, a resource

as well as a pride. Back East,

they just call it woods. Back East

they hurl curses at boys in pink panties;

 

out West they might look

at the sky and wonder

if rain is likely to spoil the harvest,

might try to forget that poor boy

hung up in Wyoming to die

on the fencepost, dressed like a regular guy

a pair of blue jeans, no gun, no hat,

no boots and no panties,

bleeding alone in the wide open sky.

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Steve Rubinstein lives in Palmer, Alaska having moved from Portland, Oregon. He is the Program Director for Alaska Pacific University’s Graduate Program in Outdoor & Environmental Education.  His family includes a couple kids, a goat, two pigs, four chickens, two rabbits, two cats and the spirit of one geriatric dog.