Sunday, September 15, 2013

Kansas Waste Land

KANSAS WASTE LAND

KANSAS WASTE LAND

One really doesn’t—
Have to be like Eliot’s
Famous Clairvoyante

Madame Sosostris—
A gypsy fortune teller
With a deck of cards

To know a Waste Land—
When she sees one like Kansas
Like Louisa Jones

Alabama was—
Her home way down there
Down in the Deep South

ENDLESS PRAIRIES

The Jones Z-Bar Ranch—
Way out in the middle of
The Tall Grass Prairie

It went on and on—
What’s simply more spectral
And lonely out there?

Than all that rolling—
Prairie Vernacular land
Without Renaissance?

Despite the Palace—
Stephen Jones built for lovely
Louisa his wife?

LOUISA JONES

She wasn’t merely—
A poor poverty-stricken
Sad Prairie Housewife

She was a Southern Belle—
Used to the pleasures and the
Dixie social life

She brought along with—
Her several black servants
A maid, butler, cook

After all, she came—
From an Antebellum home
Plantation with slaves

CATTLEMAN’S WIFE

Steven Jones lavished—
Louisa with his stylish
Grandiose Z-Bar

Truly a Southern—
Plantation palace way out
There in the Waste Land

But even Nineteenth—
Century Renaissance class
Just wasn’t enough

Just a little pool—
For her goldfish out front
Her only pleasure

THE STAIRCASE

She never came down—
The ornate costly staircase
She stayed in her room

Nor did she use the—
Classy old limestone out-house 
Behind the Mansion

She used a little—
Chamber-pot rather than the
Rude toilet out there

Her maid brought her meals—
Her butler answered the door
Her cook was superb

THE FIREPLACE

Jones sat around the—
Livingroom fireplace at night
Brooding about it

His Chase County dream—
Just hadn’t worked out quite like
The way he wanted

Cattleman’s Empire—
A Palace out on the Plains
And yet a failure

His Prairie Mansion—
Somehow had become haunted
His wife a stranger




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