Shooting It Out Poem by Michael Cayley

Log-walls rot in the ghost-town
we had thought more than gold-rush shanties.
No sheriff would waste a minute
to keep peace where only two old-timers
shoot it out in the dusk.

Rounds of silence bore closest
to the aorta and ventricles.
The past surges like old photos
of pleasure: the pendulum of wavelets
which clocked our honeymoon

deafens. In our cul-de-sac
we reload with self-torture, riddle
naked air as if gunhappy,
idly turn to settle the final score.
Not that either of us

will be sentenced for murder:
we resurrect monotonously
for the next showdown. The curtain
lifts, the blood's gone, the audience - ourselves -
are back in their places.