At the Supermarket Checkout Counter

“…FBI insiders swear Kennedy is alive!”  Weekly World News 2/24/92

…the tabloid headlines read:

JOHN F. KENNEDY STILL LIVES

…and claimed he lingers, crippled

and bound

to a wheelchair in an undisclosed

retreat; a picture, hazy and unclear,

evidenced the fact.

I pondered, only briefly, gullibility and how

our need for headlines allows that anything

and everything is real and then

forgot

the incident until today

when reading headlines of a world

that hungers after war, starves

for food and thrives

on hate and avarice and all the multiplicity

of things that make the fabric

of our world too coarse

to wear, too thin

for warmth; raggedly,

we’ve come these years

since the shot

rang out

and history happened on a Dallas street.

Perhaps

the kernel of absurdity

is truth

the seed of truth

the greater lie

the bullet struck

and just

perhaps

Kennedy lives

and the whole world died.

Susan A. Katz (All Rights Reserved, from the book “Dreaming Missouri”)

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