am i a cowboy or what?
another diary entry to get myself back here
/ some context: original poem: 1.9.25. revisited: 6.12.25.
i’m six months older now and i have maybe-covid (the tests are negative, but my dad just had it). i only felt sick after coming home—despite my combustion of at least seventy hand rolled cigarettes made with real brotherly love by real hungarians, and nails somehow bitten shorter on public transport. there are brown pen stains on the pink interior of the black shoulder bag i stole from my mother’s closet. my macbook air screen is cracked, and so is the camera of my iphone ten.
as for the poem—i was born in maryland. the crab state. there are horses on the roads there. a lot of horse shit, potholes too. and tobacco in the air, freshly wafted from virginia’s shenandoan hills where i once rode something as a kid. i think it was a miniature horse of some sort, or possibly a donkey, but i don’t think that diminishes his value. he held me up pretty good; my three-year-old legs fit neatly along his back.
my elementary school was on a turkey farm. where the turkeys went to die. unfortunately, i can’t remember what time of year they were most alive. the forests were lush and the trees were tall. you had to shield your skin tight, to protect yourself from ticks. they could hide in uncovered hair, especially if it was too long, and too visible to the naked eye. my distant cousin and my uncle (who is also my distant cousin) both got lyme disease from one of those. i don’t really know what that means. but i do love limes, so it’s a shame there’s a disease named after them.
back to my maybe-covid. and speaking of sour things, like limes. i’ve got a ghost-flavored sour patch kids hydration drink sitting lukewarm by me on my bedside table to aid in my recovery right now. i’ve been staring at it for a long time, as i cannot bring myself to drink more than sixty percent of it. i don’t think it contains any hydration whatsoever. but as someone who survived off water bottles filled with red-fortied aspartame in my journey to quit nic, i have nobody to blame. neither for my lungs, nor for my lack of piss.
the hungarians we met don’t drink much water either. they drink it from the tap when they do, obviously, but typically they opt for beer. alcohol is more sterile, better for the stomach. i nearly died vomiting on their bathroom floor, tangled in my own curls—but that’s a story for another time.
the moral of this one, though, is that they probably passed me too many brotherly love-rolled cigarettes, and my soft american stomach couldn’t handle their hospitality.
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another explanation: the contradictions
on the remedies when there’s nothing left to spill over; thick and purple like cough syrup at the bottom of a little cup. cowboys in the dmv, yuppies in a skyscrapered texas. on energy-drink oases and cigarette campfires with old friends you just now met. on how there isn’t a choice regardless, on cells swelling older and older, on the cycle of mitosis and the tumors in plastic vegetables from the grocery store. on covered skin and covered hair, raw legs vs. the invisible ticks in the trees; the invisible rays in the southern sky on sharp summer days. the white-slapped paste on your shoulder blades. the black sheath shaped for your body. on the remedies, when there’s nothing left to fill
