Darted down the shots—lightning engraving night,
save that the afternoon basked in a Bastille of gold!
Still, his cadaver represents execrable Boredom—
a fait accompli, that is, nothing repaying hysterics

or “heroic measures.” Its status is stasis, vegetable,
ready for the wanton growth of grisly fly larvae,
though the embossed wounds are grossly bright,
so shockingly pink, where lies the ex-Prez, so staunch

in stagnation. Really, unimaginable vertigo has hurtled
him to this gurney; a surge of fluorescent-tube javelins
quarrelled with now timid light, glitter now junked,
just gold-tinted squalor (as if November has already

been put through February’s icy, slushy wringer).
Bloodied is the pinstripe raiment, that capital head
(no more ever to flaunt a jaunty top-hat). Damningly
lucid is the corpse, the Commander liquidated,

with now doctors’ scalpels spitting fresh blood
on the remains, their encircling knives retracing
the jolting bolts that were plummeting, hurly burly
precipitation, decapitating and incapacitating,

so that JFK assumes the desperate nobility
of Martyrdom, the atrophied trophy of Stardom,
becomes a treasure coaxed and boxed for grave-dirt,
thanks to those emphatic arrows and his dramatic,

cavalier, exposed-as-if-on-horseback, gallivanting 
Fatalism. Magnetic is the Vandalism done his living
statue! The TV channels surf volcanically through
image upon image, the uncontrollable radiance

of that Hollywood beam, the now doleful, once-gaudy
Magnificence, even if he was the bedroom confidante
of gun-molls to Mafiosi, and of Marilyn Monroe and 
Marlene Dietrich, and of Fiddle and Faddle, and of 

any assortment of White House pages delivered carte
blanche to his man-slut proclivities, his systematic
spasms, gratis via the Secret Service. Never sparse
was his phosphorescence, the showbiz, lacquered

cleanliness, although he was privately a virtuoso
of Obscenity. Perhaps somewhere he struck a nerve—
fucked up by having someone else suck up his muck;
and that ushered on the high-noon horse-hooves 

splintering his skull, the uncompromising detonations,
the torrid bombardment, the pot shots of History,
the prime-time downpour of chilled and solid bile,
the televised Inquisition, the infernal shuddering….

In all the official forensics of that one-man Titanic
disaster, there are cohesive deficiencies, I mean, 
even medieval-level convolutions and contradictions,
turbulent configurations of triangulated gunfire

amid the bristling crowds, once whistling before 
that storybook façade busted by the inconceivable
fusillade. But now, here’s the conclusion of the star:
Blah-blah-blah-blasé dissections of a tattered, ratty

dummy, plus lab-coat duffers chiselling away 
at past-due Royalty that’s passed its best-before date, 
so that we view fresh-as-a-daisy carrion, the corpus 
delicti, following the obstinate bastinado. But was 

he an unpardonable bastard? Was he the pale grub 
secreted beneath the blackening stone? Was he 
the canting mountebank? Yes?

Why then does the “write-off” keep resurfacing?