I.
"I developed a streak of independence brought on by neglect" - Lee Harvey Oswald
Unloved boys
Who learn what they know alone
Are seen coldly, in terms of their isolation,
Not what they are isolated from,
The violence they pick up on radar.
Local loser fires three rifle shots...
But we can't clothe the killer of America
In such humble robes, we must look beyond him.
He learned Communism in the public library.
He read all the conspiracy theories.
He joined the Marines to preach
International Communist doctrine
But the troops didn't care
And the CO's yawned
And he learned how to shoot a high-powered gun.
He defected to Russia because he couldn't stand the way
America turned his mother into a pathological liar, or so he would say,
But he also wanted to invent conspiracies of his own,
To shed his experience to the other side,
To make deals with the darkness, with a poker face
That held nothing but lies, and all only to be recognized,
Illuminated. The KGB laughed,
And only after he mocked a suicide attempt
Did they let him stay as a model worker
Building televisions. But, making deals in his dreams with some third force,
Came back home, to the FBI, and Che Guevrolet, but they
Were professional, and this man offered only vanity.
The CIA wouldn't waste its time on a returned defector,
Especially one looking for a job.
How could they have expected
Their grand manufacture to have converted any souls?
He didn't know who to kill, and when he settled
On the bullet that grazed General Walker's hair,
He got away with it because he took the bus;
His pursuers couldn't think of a man without a car.
To the lawlessness and voodoo of New Orleans he returned,
To peddle himself as the fall guy
To the Cuban maelstrom's talk show fantasies.
He became Fidel Castro in his mind, resentful at all the cigars
Kennedy had stashed away.
When the KGB saw him in Mexico City, pleading that the CIA
Was tracking him, they would have laughed
If they weren't so saddened.
The long ride back, another dream shattered,
His fantasies forced a more fervent desire
That could never be requited,
But, as luck would have it, the work he got
Opened the door like a bolt of light
To the purpose of his life
— Oswald means "the power of God" —
So he left Marina his last $70 and his wedding ring
And walked with a large bag of "curtain rods" for his job at Dealey Plaza.
The whole thing was easy, there was no one to stop him,
Even his gun did not attract attention,
Even the cops, after the shooting, let him out of the building.
He had to kill a cop to get any respect at all.
When caught, playing for attention like a schoolboy,
He protested of any attention,
Was violently innocent, desperate for response.
He bantered with the cameras, making sure his smiling denials
Left no doubt of the truth. "You won't find it there,"
He said to his brother Roy when he looked into his eyes.
A sickened Jacob Rubinstein, another bit player in a play
Whose designs he did not understand, pulled the trigger for all of us.
II.
"Football is the opiate of the people" -Lee Harvey Oswald
Thirty years and 500 books later,
Oswald's creations do not recognize his cry.
We don't understand how he did, alone, what they,
Together, thought they couldn't do. We notice
How the mob chieftain toasted Kennedy's death and offered congratulations;
We see Hoover's glee at breaking the news to Bobby;
We hear word reaching the CIA just as Fidel's death serum is being delivered;
No one seemed content to have their violent hungers
Just hang there in respectful silence, without measurable response.
When the myth of one generation's youth vanished,
The procession was fantasized — as theater, as subterfuge,
For if we are who we feel ourselves to be,
We all died, as we all pulled the trigger, as we all conjured assassins
In our efforts to connect ourselves to the empty center no one sees.
