Bus

Bus

To the bus with wide seats to be

Filled with middle age members of

The Chamber of Commerce blue hairs

Smoothe roads south then north in western

South Dakota prairie for promotional

Visits to ranches where Angus cattle

Spend their limited grass fed lives

In preparation for the plates

Of my home when my sales improve

Breakfast of steak and eggs

South of town paid for by a worried rancher

I don't know but he's a friend's father

Who also has town business and money

I just saw his face in conversation

More wrinkled than just sun

More wrinkled than just age

In his Stetson hat and Tony Lama boots

Where did he rent all this seating

Outside the bus parked on gravel

The prairie doesn't care for what trods it

Or about business or coyotes

Prairie chickens puff their gullets

To attract females for bird sex

Mammal claws dig for a small meal

Deeper in the sun hardened sod

Prairie dogs scurry for the other exit

Only for eagles and hawks to swoop

Breakfast over we return 

In a que to the bus with tighter seats

Full of coffee and fried potatoes

Dead Angus and scrambled ovums

Oh I'm impressed with this generous rancher

There's nothing more I can stuff into me

Now I wonder if the bus has a toilet

That doesn't embarrass when I walk

Back through the tall seats and staring women

Headed north we're told lunch 

at the next ranch almost North Dakota

Owned by a famous family

Part of the Little House heritage will be

After a ranch stop outside Belle Fourche

Or was that other ranch first

Years past remembrance of detail

Everything is black cattle and clones today

Pot roast on the hoof with scalloped potatoes

Outside Faith named by Catholics or people

Worried how life on this open land

Will bring it's worst to the families settled here

Welcome find by rumor passing through the crowd

The ranchers new ten grand Bull 

Is tits up in a field after lightning the night before

I wonder if insurance will help

Or is the steak I eat too fresh for words

Yes bulls don't have tits so dick up then

The last stop is where gallons of semen

Last through the ages in liquid nitrogen

To take it's expected progeny through growth

Through a future of prairie and feed lots

To that magic number of twelve hundred fifty

Pounds of beefy barbeque layered in sauce

Smothered in human drool and buttered onion

The trip over its home to chicken with everything

But the cluck and beak a meal devoutly to be wished

Barry G. Wick