nothing could be found in Poe!

"use your guns to kill them!" he screamed, wearing headphones while listening to Bob Marley

and re-reading Jack Kerouac, and he droned on and on about Stella, who was thought to be hiding

behind a permanent lie and on and on about horseback riding across battlefields and honoring life

and affirming all the while he knew for certain that nothing could be found in Poe, who was last seen

ascending a narrow stairway for a view of a tomb by the sounding sea while the raven watched and said

"I'm simply 

reciting the mysterious words he gives to me!" 

eventually, with headphones removed, 

he could hear an elephant crashing through the jungle with a trunk 

filled with family skeletons and memories yet to be forgotten, 

and dangling from its' tusk, an angry drunk shouting nonsense.

and he saw clearly, hanging from the dark trees in Mississippi or was it rural Alabama,

the swinging cries of young voter registration workers before they were muffled

by the satisfied sounds of a white motor gaining distance from the scene of the crime with soulless

cigarette smokers sitting in the front seat 

swaying softly inside their custom-made Ku Klux Klan

southern shit sacks,

muttering "use your guns to kill them!"

later, on a tiny television, he watched Martin Luther King and listened to Lena Horne and Billie Holiday

proving to skeptics that they could sing.

reading Maya Angelou, he tapped his reluctant toe

and went on and on about Texas and that dumb Governor who should know that

MEXICO MEXICO claimed the territory

before the Alamo was a mission 

before the Mayflower made landfall

before the European white man betrayed the Iroquois Confederacy

before New York island was Dutch

before the current Dallas sprawl

before Burroughs and Ginsberg and the Grateful Dead and Leary died trying to say what needed

to be said 

before Ronald Reagan was shot on that Washington sidewalk and Bobby slumped,

bleeding on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador after the primary

before John Lennon died bleeding in front of Yoko in front of the Dakota Hotel

before Mormons traveled westerly in wagons warning of certain Hell Fire

and during the video games that he played mostly uninterrupted,

he never heard a word of what he was thinking

because there were too many distractions

too many enemies he was slaying while imagining invincibility

and it all became a blur or a bust or a boob or a boner 

or a shock wave from the BOMB falling through the 

afternoon air high over the inconsequential city of Hiroshima

and then the shit really did hit the fan!

when he was finally too exhausted to stay awake, sleep didn't come so easily, but that was

before the pills.

and that was

many and many a year ago,

in a kingdom by the sea.