Thursday, November 29, 2012

Lone Rider of the Santa Fe


Lone Rider of the Santa Fe


“I write cheap novelettes”
—Graham Greene, The Third Man
____________________

Funny how things work out—
Perhaps parody would be a
Better word to use I suppose

I owe my life to a cattle town—
There by the Santa Fe tracks
Back where I was born
____________

Years later now here I am—
I owe my life to a young calf’s
Valve there inside my heart

A computed tomography—
(CT) scan was imaging me
The murmur on the screen
______________

The surgeon said to me:
“And this is what we call a
Kansas sky, my friend”

My heart was all stormy—
Tornadoes swirled in the sky
Dark vortexes of turbulence
________________

I didn’t tell him that I was—
A Kansas kid from down there
In the stormy Fly Over State

My left ventral had blown—
Its gasket and my whole system
Was going down the tube
___________

Open-heart surgery fast—
The little calf’s valve is still
Beating away inside me

Each beat a reminder that—
I was born in Kansas and that
Kansas saved my life as well
______________

I’m just a Lone Rider now—
Lone Rider of the Santa Fe with
My own Z Bar Ranch inside me

It’s just a cheap novelette—
A pulp fiction Cowboy Western
My life a parody in slow motion
_________________

Weak heroes & sympathetic villains—
Dominate what used to be my story
But now it all seems so mock-heroic

All those cool matinee movies—
There in the Granada Theater during
The hot Kansas summer afternoons
___

Reminding me of Alida Valli as—
Anna in Graham Greene’s film noir
“The Third Man” (1949)

My whole concept of "hero"—
Once a part of the male domain
So patriarchal and phallocentric
________________

But now it fails to comply with—
Stereotypical Old Western pulp
Fiction storylines anymore

The real Lone Rider of Santa Fe—
Beating slowly away in my chest
Why did Kansas save me?



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