A Cowboy Has A Change Of Heart-Keith McFarlane
A Cowboy Has A Change of Heart
By Keith McFarlane
This big city’s on fire
where my vote doesn’t count
and I’m living on promises
and postage stamp glue
waiting for the change of season,
and thinking about you.
Annie - I’m still wondering
how I can keep my promise.
I won’t send these kids off to war
like you always screamed into my ear
while I turned up my Alan Jackson song
to tune you out.
When will all the promises
become real? I dust off
my old straw cowboy hat,
roll up my shirt sleeves.
Hard to believe it can happen.
Not yet. He is too
idealistic and too black.
Drive my pickup to the corner station.
I heard somebody on an NPR talk show
(do you believe it Annie? me?)
claim Democrat but won’t vote for a black man.
Is this 1950 or Mississippi?
We’ve had enough I think
as I drink from my covert can of Coors.
Stuff it back behind my seat.
Drive to Stockton for new brake pads.
I don’t work in the silver towers around here.
No, I have a scrap yard,
and I have a daughter and a son
who help me peel metal off of
tin can cars by the dozens and hundreds.
Desperate work, but work just the same.
Datsuns and Hondas sit as pristine queens
on stacks of crumpled Chevies and Fords
without doors or hoods or tail lights.
These cars don’t just fade away.
They get stripped, ripped limb from limb
because somebody paid. That’s the
way of this world, I teach my
daughter and son. Every dollar
means something died a little.
Annie hated these contraptions, and my crusher,
and sometimes she would notice blood on a
windshield. These cars are reclaimed,
I said, and sometimes that means
(out of control and eyes wide she swerved to miss
the median and corrected into a tractor trailer
crash and cubes of glass then blood and hair
and oh the wailing of her children when daddy told them
mommy died so peacefully)
reclaimed from the auto impound,
the giant evidence locker
behind the police station.
I towed our crumpled old El Camino
from just such a place,
even cleaned out the blood,
the hair, just so me
and the boy and the girl
could come visit her there,
parked proud in the front lot
as if she never left.
I think a black man could do a fine job, Annie,
and I don’t think he’ll send our boy and our girl
to die someplace without a reason.
You were right my love. And now I listen to Toby Keith
and the Dixie Chicks, sometimes even on the same day.
Copyright C. 2008 Keith McFarlane
May 25th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
You placed a lump in my throat that is not likely to go away for a long long time. It is almost as large and round as the tears in my eyes.