Kansas Poem 4

Kansas Poem #4 Hey Hoss, slow down there! No need to go so fast. Besides, I don’t want to go to where you’re going, and I don’t want to be seen to where you’re heading. Hey Hoss, please turn this furious black thing around! Kindly get me the hell out of here before it’s too late! No, I don’t wish to see this row of blighted Chinese elms and dead leaves. Nor hear the badly-sung songs of lost love and wild regret. And, I refuse to see the bloody scratches of truth and beauty, so scrumptiously etched with long blades on those splattered bricks; Embedded there for the duration, like the gum under your table; Enmeshed there as the garnished gemstones of the myriad fountains in Kansas City, Polished with grit, staid tenacity, and the time-shorn murders in the wheat lands, underground in the broad basements of purple smoke and black blood, of silent stealth movements under bending eaves, and a watching moon. No Hoss!, I don’t want to go to where you’re going. Sorry, but we seem ineffably lost and sadly wandering, like a couple of dusty dudes groveling for the keys that match nothing. No, I don’t want to go down that long Chinese lane. No! Turn this furious thing around! Here the people sit on long verandas and watch the strangers come and go. They might notice two dudes like us and wonder what we’re doing there. Sometimes I can hear a loud shrieking funeral going by on Highway 50. And those same people are staring at the two caskets, and recognizing us inside! Hey Hoss, slow down there! No need to go so fast! Besides, Time is not naïve, and Its retching Uncle has left many a lover in the shuttered room, up there on the 2nd floor, has poured many a shimmering glass, and licked many a teeming spoon. Hey Hoss, ever take a morning break at Hartman’s Café back in the day? When the Clutters would drive by waving, from inside their blue chevy impala, heading to silent Garden City, and the cold wind blowing unheard there. If you drive this black furious thing down that lane there, you will see it. It sits like an old cat in the sun, going nowhere fast from its sealed post, high upon these expansive wheat plains, under this dark, brooding, blood-thirsty sun, and an unforgiving watching moon.