It was a minor soul Ballad, though not quite a ballad,
or not a ballad at all, that brought Billy the Kid back
to life in a dive bar downtown. Someone started doing
a strut on the tile floor that looked like the floor
of a church, but it wasn’t a church it was Baltimore,
on a spring evening, during an era no one but me calls
the Renaissance of past lives now coming back to life
when someone plays that great goddamn song on the jukebox.
It was time to stand up, so we stood until we were taller
than we were before like flowers in the afternoon after
a morning when it rained, until we felt dizzy from being
so high over the tiny names carved on the wooden bar.
All the workers from the neighborhood stood up, too,
to dance, because Billy was always good to them and
was like wild west death to their enemies. So many
more names were added to the rough wood that night,
so many more words were breathed like lovers breathing
on hot, dank nights, and so many cow-men and cow-women
never sat down again for the rest of their lives, and for
four hours not a sip of beer was spilled, nor a drop of
bourbon wasted by being wiped away on a man or
woman’s lips by anything other than a kiss. And when
it was time, the floor turned to dirt in our bloodshot eyes
as Billy the Kid tightened his footsteps faster than a
pinball machine going TILT, dancing his way out the door
into the after midnight mist. And when it was time we ran
off into the night like saxophone solos, each note a word,
each sentence a nod to the tune that brought us here, each
day following the last, each night keeping the beat.

-Jose Padua

Photograph by Jose Padua