I know the contours of your face
just like the streets of my hometown
          you'd squint your eyes
                 when laughing
     at the corner of Main and Dow.

Blacktooth Brewery
               on frigid Friday nights
frosted glasses, fogging breaths
and laughs caught up
               in tightening chests.
Kendrick Park can keep its towering trees
                                   and midnight charms
if I can keep your laughter with me
                       when I sail for newer shores

Something in familiar signs,
          buzzing blackened Bighorn skies,
keeps us just above the water line--
          afloat for one more night.

Sheridan Iron Works
Red, rigid lettering a raised, distant hand
Watch it wave from on the hill
above the Kendrick boardwalk,
soak December in our smiles
choking back our April cries.

Snake's head yawning
          from the I-90 exit
slithers down Coffeen and tails
          our icy footsteps
     Rattle. Rattle. Rattle.
Shake this town to its bones
with our Thurmond Street jokes
and our glowing Gould Street hearts.
I hope
          this is enough
          to buoy our ***** up
          against the weighty ballast
          of this tiny, yawning town.

Settlers of Catan
played on a windy Wednesday night
over another drowning round
of clinking Wagon Box pints.

The contours of your face,
icy streets of our hometown,
our squinting, gasping laughter
on the corner of Main and Dow.

Blacktooth Brewery.
               Frigid Friday nights.
Fogged up glasses. Frosting breaths
and laughing, clutching tightening chests.
               This freezing town
               will test your mettle.
               Settle up and bring your friends.

It aches when I smile.
My State's a disaster.
Coal rollers, burnouts and days full of rapturous
laughter and "Red Face"
down in Lusk in the hot days
of Summer--it's boiling;
Winter winds burn up your face.
I first learned to hate
myself in a snowstorm
on Dow Street in Sheridan.
My best friends are the slow warmth
that spreads through the chest,
lifts a cold heart, grabs popcorn and pints
at the Blacktooth on hundreds of nights.
And 500,000 simple souls are a sight.
Still they're just half a million salty
drops in the ocean--
A quick squall of rain on the Bighorns.
They've opened the floodgates for *******,
morons, bigots and rednecks
and rich, ******* ranchers thinking
          everyone owes them.
And their dollars are deadpan
gallows jokes down in Cheyenne.
But I've seen cheap smiles 4 miles wide
out by Sundance.
And I've got good friends that I still carry with me
like the potent, sweet, earthy afterburn of good whiskey,
or the smell of the lodgepoles in the Spring
up in Story.
And it's still my home
even though it's so empty.
It's still my home
though it sometimes seems ******.
That State's in my bones,
I don't think it'll leave me.
So please understand that some nights
when you find me,
you've stumbled across a small splinter
chipped off of Wyoming.

The roads here,
*** tongued, black toothed
and pitted, lead somewhere.

I am sure that over the peak of it,
splayed out like toes in dry sand,
tractioned for tide, a florescence,
maybe, maybe down in the abalone towns,
the oyster shot towns - in The Mother of Pearl,
where I met a guy,
a guy named Reason,
slim fingered and wrung
out at last call.

But there it was, he said "if" first:
"nothing really closes,
I just exchange doors for
carpets, throwbacks and
occasional tables - leaf down
and close to the wall."

He said his name was Witness,
but I knew better, I knew better.
This cat was leather on tweed,
a pick-up line on a business card,
call me anytime. He had shacks
for eyes and his temples pulsed
like Patsy Cline.

He said he had a flounder's way of lying,
flat at the bottom of things - loose silted.
If I needed, he said, the skipjacks
split at dawn, but that's rarely the way
for land legs. And he grinned,
wide like a seiner.

They're always there - these ones -
slumped for a schmuck
dipped out for a just a thud away
from home, down the *** tongued
road to Blacktooth,
where the Water and Sand
shutters before The Mother of Pearl,
where the windows flicker like barbacks,
and a girl named Treason ticks...