I started this poem fifty years ago

yesterday – the day JFK was

assassinated. Untypically,

I cannot remember where I was

when I first heard the news. Wherever,

subsequently I tried out lines in my head

as I walked Liverpool’s windy streets.

Not a word of that first attempt survives.

Maybe I have become more skilled or, perhaps,

time has informed both content and style –

or, simply, made the past tractable.

On reflection, his murder was a very

modern, democratic even Tinsel Town

affair – dysfunctional shelf stacker

slays serially adulterous,

medicinal dependent president,

whose brains are captured on camera

leaving his shattered skull;

the assassin is shot – also on

camera – by a night club owner, dying

of cancer, in hock to the Cosa Nostra,

and who did it for ‘Jackie’, who returns

to Washington in her splattered pink suit

to ‘show them what they have done.’ Her pronouns

were significant, enigmatic,

accidental. Would he have been great?

Think Cuba, Nam, the Moon…