Soon I'll be holding you instead of this machine gun

Here's something I started without any idea where it will go. This all I have of it at the moment:

You are a gypsy man. You wax the edges of your handlebar mustache every morning, curling them upwards. You dance yourself to sleep at night around a fire, wearing bells that jangle against your knobbly ankles, jangle up down up down, as if trying to keep the moon awake, so that her eyes will never close and she will never drop out of sight, so that the sun will not dawn nor a new day begin. You dance yourself to sleep, trying to keep the night awake forever. 

You are a gypsy man. Music runs in your veins, your heart pumps out blood to a beat. When you pass the gypsy women, with big gold hoops in their ears and missing teeth, they waggle their hips at you, the ragged edges of their skirts lifting and jerking. You waggle your hips back, and continue walking barefoot down the path. There is dirt beneath your toenails, but so is there the earth your people have lived on for as many years as your grandmother's grandmother can count. 

You have two goats, Valeria and Jaakov. You milk Valeria every mid-afternoon, and hang her milk in a cloth over a cracked blue bucket to curdle for cheese. You fondle Jaakov's twisted horns, feeling the grain beneath your thumb, and look into his eyes knowingly, to which he jerks back and tries to butt you. Such is life. You are a gypsy man, you are Ukrainian, your name is Andrij. 

After you milk the goats, you decide to head to town, a little ramshackle main street with shops on either side that serves all your purposes for getting food, and supplies. There is a grocery store, barely lit with dusty cans of beans on the shelves and barely refrigerated chunks of meat and bundles of greens. There is a garden behind your little house, with carrots that you pull from the earth and crunch on with dirt still clinging to the tips, and with spinach and kale and leeks. For meat, your goats will do, but Valeria and Jaakov are not for eating. Valeria gives you milk and children, and Jaakov by now would be much to hard and stringy to eat—he is very old, your trusty goat who you chose from a litter of kids many years ago. Valeria has recently had children though, and that is where your nutrition will come from. 

As well as a grocery store, there is a small clothing store with fancy machine made clothing, and fabric in the back. You stop by and pick up some purple muslin for your sister so she can make herself a skirt, stringing coins and beads along the waist, to chime and sing for her when she dances. There is a little run down restaurant for the few tourists who wander through, that has pierogies and borscht and not much else. Next tot he restaurant are a bunch of little businesses that are always opening and closing the next month, continually switching between grand opening sales and going out of business sales. The gypsies don't often pay these stores much attention. Then, there is the last store.

Title Quote: Izabella, Jimi Hendrix