Billy the Kid

Billy the Kid

1



The radio that told me about the death of Billy The Kid

(And the day, a hot summer day, with birds in the sky)

Let us fake out a frontier — a poem somebody could hide in with a sheriff's posse after him — a thousand miles of it if it is necessary for him to go a thousand miles — a poem with no hard corners, no houses to get lost in, no underwebbing of customary magic, no New York Jew salesmen of amethyst pajamas, only a place where Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots people.

Torture gardens and scenic railways. The radio

That told me about the death of Billy The Kid

The day a hot summer day. The roads dusty in the summer. The roads going somewhere. You can almost see where they are going beyond the dark purple of the horizon. Not even the birds know where they are going.

The Poem. In all that distance who could recognize his face.





2



A sparkling of gold leaf looking like hell flowers

A flat piece of wrapping paper, already wrinkled, but wrinkled again by hand, smoothed into shape by an electric iron

A painting

Which told me about the death of Billy The Kid.

Collage a binding together

Of the real

Which flat colors

Tell us what heroes

really come by.

No, it is not a collage. Hell flowers

Fall from the hands of heroes

fall from all of our hands

flat

As if we were not ever able quite to include them.

His gun

does not shoot real bullets

his death

Being done is unimportant.

Being done

In those flat colors

Not a collage

A binding together, a
Memory.


Jack Spicer

Posted over on The Octopus Magazine