I sat up late with a Shoot-em-up
While the wife went off to bed,
There was a time I’d have joined her, but
She only had sleep in her head.
There was Gabby Hayes and a guy called Clint
Holed up in a barn, in Mo.,
And blasting away at the barn outside
Was an evil guy, called Joe.

I knew which was the good and the bad
Though they each wore a Stetson hat,
For Hayes and Clint’s were a pearly white
While this evil Joe’s was black.
He’d robbed the Stage, and hidden the loot
In the barn, where the good guys lay,
He yelled, ‘You’d better throw out them sacks,
If not, then you’d better pray!’

‘The Sheriff will come and kick your ****,’
Rang out the voice of Clint,
‘I’ll say, Dadburned if he don’t,’ said Hayes
‘You’re a pesky, bad varmint!’
Then it ended, as the old westerns did
With Joe laid out on a slab,
Though he starred again in a hundred films
He was always labelled bad.

I went out onto the porch to smoke
It was warm, a summer night,
While the Southern Cross shone up above
In the Milky Way, so bright,
And I pondered then on a single line
That Joe had snarled, to connive,
‘If you don’t throw out them sacks right now
You’ll never get out alive!’

The world is full of the likes of Joe
Who threaten and rob, and steal,
While the rest of us are lying low
And living a life that’s real.
But he said one thing that applies to us
To the bad and the good that strive,
Whatever the sort of life you live
You’ll never get out alive!’

David Lewis Paget