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?