There we stood, resplendent, in our articles of war
daring for a moment to forget the matters core--
that death and dying looming, like mountains in the night,
would be the grim reward for those who'd dared to fight.

The British expedition, in that humid august air,
would hoist the recognition of mankind's new despair;
the wave of Schlieffen's reckoning had broken us that day
and the yeoman of Agincourt had come and gone away.

We fought and bled and fought and died a day or two at Mons,
but soon retreat was sounded, a melody to pawns.
French soil stained in English blood and washed in English tears
then tilled by German cannons for four more ******* years

was less the blessing we first conceived, that bitter, deafening fall,
so late in 1914, when the Great War came to call.
The salient crumbled, frailly; a grave portent it seemed,
soon would come the Somme, Verdun, and horrors never dreamed.

On days like these, I look to the west,
seeing the dusky mountains, reliably in formation,
and my mind drifts skyward like hawks possessed;
I start to daydream of the wild midwest.

I sit atop my stallion, whiskey on my saddle,
surrounded by solitude as I dash through the trees
while the sunlit wind plays with my hair as I straddle
through the untamed lands catching outlaw disease.

Whirlwinds brush the dirt off my brim of my hat,
riding through nameless territories void of borders,
happy, nay, blissful to explore the wide open space,
who could wake up while riding at this pace?

Setting my spurred boots upon the wooden chest
I stoke the fire and the cabin smells of leather,
my tired cowboy soul sleeps through the stormy weather,
ready to again race into the western sunset.