kANSAS

WELCOME TO KANSAS

MORNING

Waking up, another day—

Urging myself to get going

Pulling the sheets back again

Covering myself once again

How strange it is for one’s 

Heart to be loveless in the

Cold Arctic Kansas morning

__________

NIGHT DREAM

A slinky shadow rules me—

Cocteau’s chauffeur takes me

For long evening dream drives

His gaudy Cadillac convertible  

Cruising late at night there 

Downtown on Commercial St

From college to the tracks

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MOVIE THEATERS

Nights are for dreaming —

Beneath the glowing lights 

The Dream Bijou marquee

No more Sat matinees—

Like back when I was a kid

Virgin in the Strand balcony

Elegant Granada Theater—

Not a dead Film Palace anymore

Movies & class reunions

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OBLIVION MON AMOUR

All I wanted was to be alone—

Alone in my back room with its

Bamboo shades and books

The rest of the house—

I left alone, my parents dead

I was left alone back then

Family photos tell it all—

Divorces and grandchildren

But I stayed single

Beneath it all obituaries—

My job as a college librarian

A desire for oblivion

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FOR NOW

Sometimes I wanted to just—

Shrug my shoulders & leave

Quietly without a goodbye

I hated home I guess—

And having to be there

The same little town

But everybody died—

Moved away, so I became

A male Miss Havisham

I’ll die someday anyway—

Reprehensively perfect

They’ll say so knowingly

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LESS DECEIVED

The sun’s occasional light—

Down thru the naked twisted

Elm branches along the street

Small college town full of—

Retired folks & old widows

Brittle and stiff as reeds

Each little home full of grief—

Along unhurried one-way streets

Like Constitution Street

Many of my teachers lesbians—

Their minds like drawers of knives

They were the less deceived

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FLY OVER STATE

Flying high over Kansas—

Sighing and sipping my martini

“Emporia, that’s where I was born”

Smiling my friend said:

“Where you grew up and

where you had your roots?”

“No, just my unspent—

Youth and most of my manhood

Finally I couldn’t get out of there”

It was like dying down there—

Boys all biceps, girls all tits

Lonely wheatfields forever

Nothing much happened down there

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EVENINGS

I digress though however—

I never did get out of there

I stayed there instead

Same sky, same streets—

The highway glutted with trucks

Railway tracks heavy with freight

Midwestern towns that way—

Rotting away from the inside out

Slipping down into oblivion

And above it all hanging—

The long summer nights

Nothing but prairie silence

____________

EMPORIA

Swerving east and west—

Gaunt Highway 50 moving

Through the little shithole town

Past grain elevators, haystacks—

Scarecrows, muddy snowy

Downtown spectral streets

Dead-straight thru town—

Isolate dingbat little hellhole

All the way to Colorado

Cheap suits, kitchenware—

Sharp knives, old brick

Commercial Street ruins

_____________

KANSAS

Loneliness clarifies everything—

Because there’s nothing left

But Flint Hills nothingness

Purple-bluish dead horizon—

Ending the land way out there

The range doesn’t talk much

Everything is out of reach—

Here cattle roam the range

Old limestone fences 

Silence ruling everything—

Negating anything human

Stoic Kansas prevailing

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NOTHING CAN BE SAID

Saying anything at all—

Means nothing to the ones

Living out there in Hills

Birth and death come—

And go slowly like seasons

Life is one long silent dying

Cattlemen like Jones—

Z-Bar Ranch Millionaire 

In Prairie Grove Cemetery

People in Strong City—

Don’t remember him much

They only think of the rodeo