My pack is heavy

My pack is heavy

My back feels heavy, like I've become a pack mule
For all the shattered glass in my head
Trudging along forlorn prairies, the razor grass is cutting into my clothes and into my flesh
Each footstep I take is a resonating boom, carried westward to where Crazy Horse sleeps in stone and weeps for his dead people 
My sighs of exhaustion are answered by circling buzzards and the cries of coyotes, begging to eat what's lies left under this pack
The rain is warm, yet the ground is as cold as Custer's corpse
When God cuts you down, sometimes You cut back
Our suffering is our own creation
I made my reality with my own choices
Is that why the stones on the ground cut my boot-less feet?
Or all the powder in my musket is wet or spent?
The valleys and lowlands go on for miles, so empty and quiet
What I wouldn't kill to hear the laughter of friends
To feel the warmth of woman's lips
What I wouldn't give to cry to my mother and father that I love them
Just one more time
The valleys and lowlands go in for miles in all directions
What direction do I go?
Just south of the grapevine?
Or north of the redwood?
My pack is burdened by my regrets throughout the years
And my canteen filled with spent tears
For unworthy wayfarers
West of where bees make honey in dead bodies
And east of where raging rivers cascade into holes of nihil
One day my pack will get lighter
I beg that it does
It would be nice to walk on gravel roads again