Blackout

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Dallas, JFK, mourners in black.
Where do we go now, is there no way back?
Helicopters hover, there's a gunman in the clouds.
There’s a chokehold on the soul, too many dead,
too many guns, too much lead.
Memphis, Martin Luther King, mourners in black.

Where do we go now, is there no way back?
Helicopters hover, there's a gunman in the clouds.
There’s a chokehold on the soul, too many dead,
too many guns, too much lead.
L.A. RFK, mourners in black.
Where do we go now, is there no way back?

Helicopters hover, there's a gunman in the clouds.
There’s a chokehold on the soul, too many dead,
too many guns, too much lead.
George Floyd, mourners in black.
Where do we go now, is there no way back?
Where do we go now, is there no way back?

JFK

A dancer twirls on top of a musical box

and spins round and round in a loop.

A child pulls the string of a doll that talks.

A TV anchor spins a web of half-truths and lies

while his soul

withers and dies.

The TV commercials run. Get your online degree

and change your life

between the pratfalls of Andy and Barney Fife.

An old friend of mine from Dallas, the nephew of CIA cowboy

and assassin, Rip Robertson,

would tell me stories about visiting Miami

and New Orleans when he was a boy

and playing baseball in a vacant lot

and about his uncle landing on the beach at the Bay of Pigs.

‘What did your uncle say

about the death of JFK?’ I asked.

In an alcoholic blackout, my friend replied, ‘Good shot’.

The Angel of Death

The aliens have landed. They’re wearing gas masks

and looking just like the military police.

Elmer Fudd has been disarmed.

Elmer Fudd will no longer have access to a gun.

A vagabond beats over and over on a plastic drum.

Here, the world revolves around a make-believe sun.

The red and blue people tell each other lies.

The Angel of death poses on a beach

dressed in black, 
holding a sickle and wearing a crown.

A solitary woman sits in a corner and cries.

All the businesses are gone in the center of town.

If I could hold on to the rain.

If I could live in a world without pain,

where no one lies and no one dies. 
George Floyd carried away in a horse drawn hearse.

If I could just hold on to the rain.

If I could.

Lady G

The moon comes out from behind a cloud

and witnesses a meeting between J Edgar Hoover

and Lady G in Lafayette Park.

Lightning flashes and so begins a clandestine romance.

In the shadows, the two lovers begin to dance.

One moans and the other cries out aloud.

I dream a dark dream and see a dark truth.

I see automatons with automatic weapons standing guard 

in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I see looters 

in Manhattan and Beverly Hills.

I see David Dorn murdered on Martin Luther King Drive

for nothing but a TV.  Apathy kills.

Almost forty years ago, in the Dallas County Jail,

I witnessed an intoxicated black man 

put in a chokehold for over ten minutes.

His body limp, his eyes 

lifeless, blank. I was under arrest for DWI.

I was white and did not die.

Humpty Dumpty

Sirens wail, red and blue lights flash.

Marshall McLuhan

foresaw the invention

of the internet 
and declared TV was cool

but did not predict this. 

White girls listen to rap
(Or is it a nursery rhyme?)

and smoke cigarettes at the pool.

The dinosaurs and dollar stores in DC 
all carry guns.

The death and unemployment rate is up.

'Humpty Dumpty sat on Trump’s wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All of the DC horses

and all of Trump’s men

could not put Humpty 
together again.'