I used to be a gangster, a criminal, in my mind.

I was a hood, flint-eyed and never afraid.

Some of you will remember that incarnation,

my time as an oulaw when I stalked the mean

streets.  There were posters everywhere.  I was

a wanted man.  There was a lot of talk.  Some of

it grew mean.  Who was that masked man?

How many silver bullets did he leave this time?

I longed for a side-kick.  It was a long time ago, the details grow hazy but sometimes hurrying somewhere I catch my reflection in a street window and for a moment my face is flint hard,

fearless, like the gangster I once was.

 

I speak in many languages, rarely the one I was

born to.  Prairie vernacular is my mother tongue

and in the right company I revert to that pidgin like a trader in the south seas.  And like a trader in the south seas I am as foreign.  When I am in

a small town on the prairies they search my pockets for bright coloured beads.  The only time I am native in the place I was born is in my memory, not quite genetic, not yet ancestral where still I run barefoot on country roads and the wind like no other in the world blows forever in my face.  And in my not yet ancestral mind

I am beginning to imagine a prairie landscape different from my own.  In this country in my

mind there are many faces, languages.