Two inches of snow in Norwich and this city shuts down. “There just isn’t enough grit!” -blam!- You, I’m from Kansas Where grit comes from the inside Where blizzards bury children in as little as eight minutes And you just deal with it. Socialized health care? -blam!- You, I’m from Kansas If you get cut, you die. Simple as that. Sure, we’ll pray for ya’ll, but that’s about it. We buried pa in a field by the Kaw River after the rustlers came, And ma died while trying to birth that calf, kicked in the head to death, Little sister was bitten fifty-two times by a rattlesnake before she managed to bite off it’s head, and we couldn’t afford the antidote cause the cattle died of blight. The poison still courses through her veins today. Makes her mean. And when the well ran dry, fifteen kids tripped and fell into it Cute little blonde-haired blue-eyed kids, Like the kind you save in movies Movies that are never set in Kansas And as they fell to their tiny deaths We just watched. Health and Safety? -blam!- You, I’m from Kansas I went to school in a class of four hundred Only eight of us are still alive We couldn’t find Billy Ray after that twister got him. He’s probably somewhere in Missouri Or Ohio Or maybe Iowa. Or maybe bits of him in all three. Did we miss him, yup, But -blam!- You, I’m from Kansas It’s just part of God’s plan We just got color in ’94, before that, everything was black and white Except the people, they were just white. I’m not racist, -blam!- You, I’m from Kansas. When the Indians come You’ve got to circle the wagons to survive I learned to dodge arrows from an early age In the grim light of the campfire and smoke signals. The smoke signals crying out “Get the -blam!- outta Kansas.” Because Kansas was named after the Kansa Indians. Before we shot them. -blam!- you, Indians, this is our Kansas. Nineteen of my friends died of dysentery, Cholera got the other six My Facebook page reads like the book of the dead The dead of Kansas. I cried once, when I was two, and pa punched me in the face -blam!- you, son. We don’t cry. Not in Kansas. Nothing tastes better in Kansas than pain. We like our women to have teeth But it doesn’t always work out that way You don’t always get what you want in Kansas. In the Kansas winter people freeze to death, and in the summer they die of heat stroke The spring brings tornadoes which kill thousands and destroy our livelihood and our precious trailer homes. Fall’s cool, though, in Kansas, fall’s cool. If you don’t drink a case and a half of Pabst Blue Ribbon a day -blam!- you, get out of Kansas. If you don’t stop at the titty bar along the highway -blam!- you, get out of Kansas. You can’t be queer in Kansas, or that’s a shootin’. Our capital, Topeka, is built of sticks and mud. We added a brick once, and the whole thing fell over. Forty thousand people died. So we just started again. -blam!- you, I’m from Kansas. I graduated at the top of my class in Kansas because I went to the library and read the book. Now I’m governor. Governor of -blam!-ing Kansas. So when the snow comes next, and ya’ll English are trying to push your -blam!-y French cars out your ever-so-slightly frosted over roads, don’t come whining to me. I’ve seen it all. On the cold, cold prairie. -blam!- you, I’m from Kansas.