Cicada thrum and the drooped frame of the cowboy's mustache

To pass time, the cowboy’d climb
down from his reedy steed
To pick up empty soda cans and bottles
that verily litter the verdant plains, 
collecting them patiently
and postured purposeful
in a feed sack he’d pinched 
from a grocery loading dock
in one of the nameless and dying 
small towns he’d proved through
on his westward prowl.
 
Each day alone
(when the sun quits
it's quitting time/
noon is a boon
to napping under cool)
Necessarily lonelier
(rise and shine
for the promise of progress/
the time of your life
is now or never for the better)
Sculptural solitude settles in.
 
Chain smoking romantically
the cowboy eyes yonder nearby...
confides in his diary ...
stirs beans with a wooden spoon ...
darns holes in his undergarments ...
whittles n whistles to bore his insomnia ...
boot scrapes with a cedar branch
and whispers into a meaty breeze,
“damn, I am nature – too messsy for words”

He squints, he sits. 

The cowboy posed on a ridge between two great mesas: supposing the nearby distances with caustic ambivalence; inhales deep the prairie's dusky flatulent bloom; caroms between memories of loves that bound him fast and loves that led him to embrace lonesome.  He reckons himself attuned to his fears, sincerely, reflective and accepting of all he's done and the roles he's played in outcomes prior to his current circumstance. 
 
Inching towards, inching away ... baby stepping is a baby sometimes falling down ... mapping any ol next-frontier or out-of-box hankering. Certain like a man of steel weighed down by a coat with pockets full of broken magnets. 

Recalls a saloon floor's peanut-shelled clutter and the echo of floozie slurs. Card players, tall hatted even inside, and a cane barrel appropriated for branding iron on haunch anticipations. Prideful sniffs to catch her scent leaving through the buck and sway of flapping doors.
 
Cowboy pause to bed alongside the razzle dazzle of cacti thumbs  and respite from his dust tour of the great wide open. Giddy for the next day's roam and blanket skinned against the cold lonesome of occupancy under a billion stars, his eyes close meditating on the vast variety of choices that might birth his tomorrow.