Sitting on a subway train watching all the people lose their senses

* From Ed Sander's America: A History in Verse, Volume 3:

A Hunger for Total Loyalty

Like the Communists he hated
Johnson demanded a party line on the War
& total loyalty from his
tongue-lashed troops

1965: 184,300 troops 636 killed
1966: 385,300 troops 6,644 killed
1967 485,600 troops 16,021 killed
1968 536,000 troops 30,610 killed

Headphones at Dawn

Just as young people studied City Lights pocket poets
or mimeographed magazines
for news that was Really News

by the mid and late 1960s they studied stereo albums
as if they were religious texts
or as an anodyne to the crimson chaos
or even to help them build courage to
stand up for change

Raptured at dawn with headphones listening to Cecil Taylor
Jim Morrison & the Doors

Joni Mitchell
the wild wail of Janis

Dylan & other mind-mending mind-bending
mixes from the revolution in multi-track over-dubbed recording

-- gifts from what Charles Olson called the Electromagnetic Aeon

Nixon

brought in Henry Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller's associate
to be his National Securtiy Advisor
Kissinger had offered to work for Humphrey,
but secretly worked for Nixon's election
as we have seen

Kissinger was what they called a power freak
He was vindictive, quick to anger
and he had a Cosmic Ego, as if he'd taken too much acid
with actually taking any
He was a secrecy-batty would-be Metternich
who, the time-track will reveal,
care not many whits
for napalmed civilians
& glazed eyes in the world's ditches

Nixon selected humas named H.R. Haldeman
& John Ehrlichman as his "personal aides."

They were living labs of "power corrupts"
& served as his political knife-men

All three were classic examples of what the historians
Charles & Mary Beard once called
"advisors swollen with infallibility"