For Mary Jo Kopechne
And Edward Kennedy

Once upon a Massachusetts midnight,
under a sky smoothed of light,
as if wiped by flannel,
a car sailed off a bridge
but did not float.
Then the water, the dark grey water,
opened its mouth
and I slid down its throat.
But when it tried to swallow
the man they call my lover and my killer,
it choked and spat him back into your faces.
He carried no traces of me on his body
or in his heart,
but the part I played in his destruction
made me worthy of all Shakespeare's villains.
Yet why doesn't somebody
tear me from the bit player's cold embrace
and let me set the stage on fire,
dressed up in revisionists' flesh?
Why doesn't someone write the monologue
that will finally explain this melodrama
and let me claim it?
Let me perform my own exorcism
as I performed the music of my dying
to someone else's rhythm.
Give 'em a show, Mary Jo Kopechne,
the one they really paid to see.
Bring down the house of Kennedy for good,
or, like Jehovah, re-create it in its soiled image.
I don't know. I don't know.
What scene is this, what act?
How did I miss the part where I enter to applause,
where the prince of make-believe
is waiting beside the hearse,
all its doors thrown open?
But right here in the script
somebody's written Enter beside the word Exit
and under that You Choose.
But when I do,
a human wall closes round me
and I can't get to you, Teddy,
behind your friends,
their arms raised to fend off blows,
even my own parents, with chests bared
to take for you any condemnation
aimed like a bullet.
If I shove those dominoes, they will fall
while I go marching in,
some Satchmo who'll blow the walls
of this Jericho of lies down?
But this aside's too complicated,
too weighed by metaphors and similes.
All right, I'll say it plainly.
Jack or Bobby would have died with me.
Think of publicity, the headlines -
you'd have been a hero.
Instead you caught your media resurrection
in your teeth and let it go.

You dove and dove
for that woman
so often reduced by the press
to just breasts and Mound of Venus,
But I broke free of all that.
I found another kind of ecstasy.
I'd always thought my only calling
would be acquiescent mate,
but goodness doesn't count
among self-made nobility,
especially the Irish Catholic ones.
What does is the pose of sacrifice,
so I swam deeper and deeper down,
hoping you'd understand and follow,
but each time you rose for air,
you sucked it like a child at breast.
It should have been mine,
full of death's sweet buttermilk,
but yes, you broke the skin of water
one last time,
you climbed onto Dyke Bridge
alive, but dead to the world.
If only you'd realized it.

How ironic that from your stained integrity
came the conscience of what's left
of the Democratic party,
brought to its knobby knees by Mistress Fortune.
You have earned that,
you who've grown fat and jowly
at the table where no feast is ever served,
just sparkling water with a twist of lime,
where once a glass of gin and tonic stood,
a good son's hands about to raise it in a toast
in praise of brothers.
Sometimes, stunned, you ask the dark
beyond the footlights
what happened to that life.
Other times, you slowly strip
to a Bessie Smith blues song,
you know the one about dues
and jelly, always jellyroll,
or you play the ond magic trick -
a member of the audience holds up
an object from your past
and you identify it with charades.
But if you'd only ask me,
I'd erase those lines you've drawn on air
and deconstruct my own unfinished masterpiece,
a family portrait
of one man
and one true wife,
who, though the race was lost long ago,
stands behind him
with a starting gun
as he forever runs and runs in place

Accident at Midnight
By Mark Easley
Inspired by Ai "Go"

Once upon a Massachusetts midnight,

Where the air is a dank camouflage

unforeseen events happen in a blur.

History can go unrecorded.

beneath the haze of the evening

death and danger lurk in every turn.

the sound of tires screech as they hit the pavement.

the car lifts, nearly vertical on sharp turns.

it skids as it comes to the river crossing.

the splintering of wood as the car breaks the railing

is like the splintering of my heart.

I feel weightlessness, I’m flying.

Reality drops its weight on me.

I can’t tell if the impact killed me

All I know is everything is a blur, a haze.

I know water is flowing in the car

1,000 moments from my life play in fast forward as if in response

Emotions flood my spectrum

too numerous to comprehend.

My presence darkens.

I feel a hand grip me.

I fight it.

Then more hands and more

until I am pinned to my destiny,

the Reaper’s sickle in front of me

After the blood wedding
at Little Big Horn,
I rose from death,
a bride loved past desire
yet unsatisfied,
and walked among the mutilated corpses.
Skin stripped from them,
they were as white as marble,
their raw scalps like red bathing caps.
Sometimes I bent to stroke the dying horses
as dew bathed my feet.
When I tore the arrow from my genitals,
I heard again the sound of the squaws.
the trills on their tongues thrilled me.
Those sounds were victory
and I was victory's slave
and she was a better lover than my wife
or the colored laundress
I took under a wagon one night
when I was hot with invincibility.
Why, eventually even Sitting Bull
joined a Wild West show.
He rode a dancing pony
and sold his autograph to anyone who'd pay
and I might have become president,
my buckskin suit, white hat,
two guns, and rifle
flung in some closet
while I wore silk shirts
and trousers made of cotton
milled on my own shores
and took my manly pleasures
with more accomplished whores.
Instead I dress in lies and contradictions
and no one recognizes me.
All they see is the tall, skinny mercenary
with yellow hair
and blue, vacant eyes that stare,
so while I chew the tips of my moustache,
the cameras pass over me.
The journalists interview that guy or that one
and I want to shoot them down,
but that's been done before
by some back-door assassin or other
who kills publicly for sport,
but I kill for sport,
but I kill for
the spectacle, the operatic pitch
of the little civil wars
that decimate from inside,
as in Belfast, Beirut, or Los Angeles,
where people know how it feels to be
somebody's personal Indian,
a few arrows, a few bullets short of home,
then left behind to roam this afterlife.
Once I knelt on one knee,
firing from my circle of self-deceit,
no thought but to extinguish thought,
until I brought down each brave,
but it was his red hand that wounded me,
no matter how many times I shot,
clubbed, clawed, or bit him,
my mouth overflowing with blood,
the rubbery flesh I chewed
that left no evidence of my savagery.
When I raised the gun to my own head,
I recalled the fields and fields of yellow flowers
that lit my way as I rode to battle.
How beautiful they were,
how often I stopped to pick them.
I twined them in my horse's mane
and in my hair,
but they were useless amulets
that could not stop my bullet
as it sizzled through flesh, then bone.
Now misfortune's soldier,
black armband on sleeve and hand on heart,
I pledge no fear
as chance propels me into another breach
from which there is no deliverance,
only the tragicomedy of defeat acted out
in the belly of the cosmic whale,
where I swim against the dark, relentless tide.

Currents don’t like me
By Mark Easley
Inspired by Ai "GENERAL GEORGE
ARMSTRONG CUSTER:
MY LIFE IN THE THEATER"
 

Life is the ocean.

Luck is its current.

The current always flows in the wrong direction .

I am stuck on an island.

The only water is truth.

The only sustenance

is opportunity.

My shade haunts me

like the ghost of Christmas past.

The sand burns me

like bacon on a hot stove.

I am stuck in the shallows

where I swim against the dark, relentless tide.