The Year Before I was Born

“A nation, like a person,
has to have an inner drive in order to succeed.” – Richard Nixon

In the year before I was born
a worn through
and tattered salesman
composed reel-to-reel messages
to Maestro Bernstein
attempting to explain why
he was going to kill
Richard Milhous Nixon.

That everyman, that nobody,
Sam Byck, clung to desperate dreams
of dignity and fragments
of a flat-lined marriage;
broken and jagged around the edges
where human contact
could have, perhaps, smoothed over
the rough and troubled places in his life.

He killed himself
in the Baltimore airport
the year before I was born.

(2009)