Where was Einstein?

When Daniel Ellsberg
went looking for his bus,
he saw the war,
felt the sun turn cold 

and ugly 

with political lies
falling from a deceitful sky
like incendiary bombs over North Vietnam,
spilling onto the streets in front of the White House.

near central Saigon on Tu Do street,
a flow of blood dripped constantly from the sharp teeth
of slippery men wearing their helicopter smiles,
trafficking dope 

from a railroad town in Laos
down the trail 

under a heart of darkness:
their American machine guns shooting up
the hard thin arms of Oriental hunger.

On a plutonium pathway the buffalo grass turned shit brown
with the CIA and Agent Orange
locked in a fatal embrace 

from the Plain of Jars
to the Central Highlands,

to the DMZ,
picking pure white daisy petals
while counting down from twelve 

to four and finally closer to zero:
under a cloudy mushroom afternoon,
Nixon was inaugurated to deliver
PEACE 

while fighting for his golden Crown
in the slaughter hallways of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Where was Einstein?
when Daniel Ellsberg
said there were no winnable options
for a WAR 

in jungle thick with sudden death
and monsoon confusion?

A thousand western schemes floated beguilingly,
mingled with autumn flower petals 

on the Perfume River,
past the starving bones of an angry Imperial ghost,
to their lonely grave 

in the South China Sea.