FLY OVER STATE POET 

The Librarian

Poet Laureate

The Artist

The Pianist

The Historian

The Boy Who Barked

Athens of the Midwest

The Librarian

The dayz of being—

A queeny reclusive

Librarian are zip

No more fantasies—

Being Miss Havisham

In the WAW Library

Elsie Pine gave—

Me the book award

And a little advice

Being a poet—

In Kansas is the

Quickest way to Nowhere

When she died she—

Gave $1 million bucks

To the Library fund

Poet Laureate

Denise Low became a

Kansas Poet Laureate

From lovely Emporia

Growing up there—

She had Mrs. Sullivan

For English at EHS

But spreading the—

Gospel of the Prairie

Muse across Kansas

Giving readings in—

Topeka & Dodge City

And there in Olpe

Just wasn’t my—

Idea of Bona Fortuna

Fly Over State Poet

The Artist

Give me a break—

The Flyover State

Doesn’t give a damn

Who cares about—

Whitman’s tan-faced

Pretty Prairie Boyz?

Stark spectral—

Gothic Americana

Prefers Nothingness

Limestone fenceposts—

Stauffer’s lonely pylons

Like gaunt tombstones

Welcome to Emporia—

A good place to die

And wither away

The Pianist

Such strong hands—

Vernon Sheffield has

My mother once said

Pounding away—

At piano polonaises

Chopin in Plumb Hall

If she only knew—

Just how strong his hands

Really were, my dear!!!

I met him in the—

Sunken Garden next to

Ghostly Norton Hall

I was Alma then—

In “Summer and Smoke”

Vernon a traveling salesman

The Historian

Weird Mr. Mosher—

Ensconced down there

In the Basement

The Lyon County Museum—

Full of artifacts stored in

The Civic Auditorium

Before they moved—

Them across Sixth Ave

To the Carnegie Library

I helped him give—

Tours there to traveling

Bands of school kids

The glass cabinets—

Full of Civil War stuff

G. A. R. memorabilia

The Boy Who Barked

Mosher’s young son—

A gimpy harelipped

Local spastic retard kid

Standing on the corner—

Waiting for the lights on

Commercial to change

He’d bark like a dog—

If you stared at him

Startling the shoppers

He had a job—

Stacking pop bottles

At Reeble’s South

Just another—

Strange inhabitant

In weird Emporia

Athens of the Midwest

Two little Cowtown colleges—

Stuck out there in the Plains

KSTC & the College of Emporia

A Santa Fe Railroad—

Running through the joint

Shipping cattle to Kansas City

The Anderson Feed Lots—

Giving the lovely community

The Sweet Aroma of Cowshit

How could anyone be so—

Hoity-toity to call such a town

The Athens of the Midwest?

With that Ode de Colone odor—

That Cow Patty plopped smell

Pervading one’s curled Nostrils?