Chasing After the Man in Black

Arranged simply for accuracy,

Focus lost, on a girl, a lover's tale,

From the past, in flames she lay,

The town's mistress,

The victim of this tale,

We passed brooks and trenches,

Looks from old and new,

Eyes so keen, they burn through the soul,

Capture photographically,

Now our faces can't be erased,

We can't escape.

A pounding of the heart followed

Like drums tumbling off ship decks

And crashing against the concrete below,

Scattering oily messes

For authorities to clean.

They said, "That man is in town"

Put across their barstools signs,

"Visitor's out"

No vacancy on any inn,

Had to sleep like dogged sheep

In gloomy farm fields below

The shade of rocks under a field of orchard trees.

We didn't find her there

At the heart of the Madmen's lair,

Shot after shot,

Bullets flew threw the air,

Caressed the cheek, even,
but she was

Not on this parallel Earth.

We passed by a red rose

And stuck our noses out

For the queen, hid among branches,

Got the drop on the madmen

On their long-horned demon horses,

Like unicorns from hell,

With their fiery wings sustaining them in mid-air,

But a bullet is a bullet,

Brings down any flying thing.

My friend, that man in spurs,

Shot as though

Through necessity,

His hands moved, did they move,

Fast as lightning,

Through wind they cut,

Sliced sideways

To a gun belt,

The trigger was slow to his touch.

The speed at which he shot them

Calloused his hands from

The impact of steel so quick to the fingers

Yet he kept firing until it was certain

No man or horse would get up.

We didn't find her, this girl, allure of

Lavender on the trail,

Despair shone on his eye,

Madness,

An ominous feeling caressed the air.

We were moving on our feet

Away from that Town.

Upon reaching a cross-roads

We saw two,

A woman in blue

And a woman in red,

And both were beautiful

With lips sensual and bellies exposed.

But we realized too late they were mirages
of the mind!

Suddenly, a wind arose, picked up the sand,

A trembling of the mind

To conquer the end,

But no man can simply

Think his way out,

We couldn't jump off the road onto either side,

Both women relaxed then vanished.

He realized without a tear or remorse,

That I was no more.

He had to take one of us,

That other man,

The man in black.

Quick as could be my friend turned his sights on him,
although he was not visible to us

But didn't get his gun out in time.

A first, for either of us,

Perhaps the battle was finally lost,
we had lost our triple-alliance
and our horses and our war-torn horn.

I was lifted into the air

Fifty feet up,

Then as though a magic or

Fiendish spell,

My body stood still and

Felt frigid cold,

And I was a block of ice floating sideways

Under that other's control.

No bullet could kill him yet.

My friend screamed, "John!"

And the next thing I felt was

A freefall.

When I hit the ground,

I was out of the depth of life,

Struggling to breath,

Bones from my back

Broke my ribs, I was dead,

In a sense, death would come soon,

And, as I thought he would do,

My friend chased after

The man in Black,

As he would for a time,

As we did while I lived,Always chasing the man in black.