The Ballad of the Good Cowboy

(The Maverick Press, 1997)

A small press reprint of a long poem written in the seventies and published in the The Reaper, a literary magazine devoted to narrative poetry. This poem is in the tradition of cowboy poetry, a mystical/comic/mythic adventure of a West in which there was nothing east of Chicago, and three cowboys, based on Parsifal, Bors, and Galahad, set out to rescue Christ's imprisoned sister from her mysterious snake-eyed abductor. The poem explores Aztec, Northwest Indian, and Eskimo cosmology, and includes an episode at the siege of the Alamo.