Music Banter - View Single Post - Romantic Cowboy Poetry For Cowboys By Cowboys

WWWP · 01-18-2020, 08:57 AM

November 11, 2019

Quote:

I ain't got no life
I just got living
No white picket fence
No love that's worth giving

I tried living with marriage
It didn't sit well
I became someone I hated
A man living in hell

I've raised 3* kids, a single dad
Most of my years spent alone
I take pride in the success of my children
The closest thing to love that I've known

I don't regret the loneliness
The unlovable soul I've become
I question the fallacy of wedded bliss
When life has offered me none

People come and people go
Seldom do they stay
Promises made and promises broken
Same story, different day

A passionate soul, heart on his sleeve
A man who prefers more to give
Hidden behind a guarded exterior
Seeking a life meant to live

I ain't got life, I just have living
Destined to spend it alone
Good times and bad, joyous and sad
I'm getting by all on my own

-Wykid

Annotated Version

Quote:

I ain't got no life
I just got living

Here the author borrows from 2015's The Revenant - a film chronicling the struggles of a vengeance-filled fur trapper in the late 1820's. The full line, "Life? What life are you talkin' about? I ain't got no life! I just got a living and the only way I get to do that is through these pelts!" Delivered by Tom Hardy, he speaks to the lonely, punishing, and unforgiving frontiersman life, and the author invites the reader to assume comparison between the narrator and such so-called Mountain Men.

Quote:

No white picket fence
No love that's worth giving

Ok lol except we absolutely had a white picket fence

Spoiler for White Picket Fence:

Quote:

I tried living with marriage
It didn't sit well
I became someone I hated
A man living in hell

Here our author introduces a victimhood narrative, one we will see emerge repeatedly throughout his collection. He at once separates himself from the violence perpetrated at his hand, and evokes images of a character that is tormented and who has struggled with coming to terms with their past, and so creates a new, more palatable version of an honorable man who fell victim to circumstance.

Quote:

I've raised 3 kids, a single dad
Most of my years spent alone

In an interesting form of revisionist history worthy of a Tarantino trilogy, the narrator speaks of raising three children as a single father, and then conversely speaks of living for years in solitude. Our author is likely unaware of the contradiction, as he seems to be conflating his true personal history with that of the narrator, the hero, the Mountain Man. The narrator may have been a single father, but the author certainly was not. Perhaps we, the audience, are meant to pick up on this virtue signaling untruth - for the deeper we delve the more dishonesty is uncovered. There are pieces of truth: most of the author's years have been spent alone, because once his divorce was finalized he dumped the kids with their grandparents and moved out of state.

Quote:

I take pride in the success of my children
The closest thing to love that I've known

So.... not love?

Quote:

I don't regret the loneliness
The unlovable soul I've become
I question the fallacy of wedded bliss
When life has offered me none

Again the author evokes images of the solitary grizzled Mountain Man, lonely but unloveable. The narrator speaks of regret, insisting he has none - another repeated theme in his works. His misuse of the word fallacy makes the reader question whether he knows that "fallacy" and "lie" are not interchangeable, but I'm sure that there's a deeper meaning there that we the audience are too simple to comprehend. Indeed, wedded bliss is difficult to achieve when you marry your mistress after knowing her for six weeks and break her orbital bone slamming her face into a dresser by week seven.

Quote:

People come and people go
Seldom do they stay
Promises made and promises broken
Same story, different day

An incredible use of rhyming structure here, just a beautiful display. If you can't fit two to three overused cliches into your stanza and make them rhyme are you even a poet?

Quote:

A passionate soul, heart on his sleeve
A man who prefers more to give
Hidden behind a guarded exterior
Seeking a life meant to live

In contrast to the image fostered of a lonely, unloveable Mountain Man with no regrets, our narrator now concedes that he is actually full of passion, with his heart on his sleeve, ready to give his love away - if only it were enough. While the poem begins with Hardy's lament, "I ain't got no life, I just got living," the poem now turns toward the narrator's softness - whereas previously he asserts he does not regret his lonely life, here we are given a glimpse through that "guarded exterior" to see the true existential crisis facing our aging author. Will he find a purpose in this life? Is his life worth living? Time is running out.

Quote:

I ain't got life, I just have living
Destined to spend it alone
Good times and bad, joyous and sad
I'm getting by all on my own

It is unclear whether the author intended to flip the opening lines of the poem here its conclusion - "I ain't got no life" becoming "I ain't got life," and "I just got living," now expressed "I just have living," - or whether just like in every other capacity the narrator is simply unreliable and inconsistent.