Narrative Poem: First Draft

July 16, 1990: Election Day for Pope Michael I of Kansas

Superman grew up there.
His heavy denim rugged,
his letter jacket torn by sheer
velocity when he took flight, unexpectedly.
He learned the truth about home, and left for the Big Apple.

Kansans tilted chins when he joined the East Coast liberal Media Machine.
After all, he was alien, kryptonite-sissy,
lily livered freak
in blue tights and red speed-o, not to mention
his cape. So long sissy, those New Yorkers need your bleeding-heart ass.

Dorothy risked her curls and Toto’s too,
she faced the Wicked Witch of the East
to get back home there.
Miss Kansas herself wanted two things:
to get home and to love her dog.

The Witch—green tight-lipped, single, magic mistress, femi-nazi—
sizzled at Dorothy’s humble bucket toss.
She desired to extinguish the Eastern Witch,
not kill. And see the thanks she gets
from those who trembled under the witch? Not a penny.
The Ozites sent her home and forgot her, entirely.

Superman’s first home, Dorothy’s Ithaca,
this is the land where John Brown killed to fight slavery,
and Pizza Hut was born.

In Wichita, the “Summer of Mercy” clenched
prairie souls and recruited soldiers for the unborn,
back in ’91. Christian agape flushed the Ar-kansas river banks,
cartoon babies pled from hand-lettered signs along the highways,
Save the Children! Choose Life! Your mother did!

Pope-fearing Catholics
simmered on the hard-scrabble plains,
took flight and turned to home, the Vatican way off in Rome,
for guidance when the protests turned violent.

Some Catholics there, in Kansas, just sneered:
We don’t have super powers or Dorothy’s glass slippers,
wouldn’t click our heels anyway to see the Pope and kiss his fat gold ring.
If we could see the Holy Father, we’d say:
You, all do respect, are a scoundrel and a fraud, a victim
of sociology and hand-holding guitar-strumming new-age professor types.
Latin is God’s tongue.

Pope Michael had reigned already a year,
when civil protests exploded,
but as far as the record goes,
he didn’t have much to say or
no one listened.