Flat on my back in switchgrass, I sing ‘O Give Me a Home’ to the thousand-mile wind. Sometimes when I sing I even love my father. I feel how his braced leg fails him on any grassy slope. I see his withered right ankle, pale upon the good one, as he scoots along the floor to the bathroom—“out of my way!”—his privacy lost to loose BVDs and desperation. I sing of the sweet land where fathers died for liberty, and I love him.

I love my mother when I sing of that swan like a maid in a heavenly dream. I sing our Kansas anthem and in those few lines I float with her, calm and protected. I forget my ugly duckliness, and I love her.

What holds grief? What furrow deep inside, what red canal, hoards the debris, the leavings, the cut-away parts of my original form? Is there enough left? Can my true form be recovered?
Once upon a time I was a boy, not especially happy, destined for ordinary incompleteness, and the daubed, crudely-molded, and spruced character with which we makeshift, once conflagrations are doused and youth's megrims give way.
Three boys took my cocked hat, my hope for a natural death, my healthy color in good company. They corrupted me. They made me think they knew me, better than anyone, before or since.  They removed the boy I was and crawled in, to fester in the raw empty, and became ghouls in my oily corners, squatting on crumbled concrete. Thieves. Monsters.