John Quincy Adams wrote a book of poetry. So did Abe Lincoln. And now Jimmy Carter’s earnest if sometimes hokey volume of musings, Always a Reckoning, has made the best-seller lists. But these sensitive souls were not alone in their devotion to the muse—as we learned when we discovered a coffee-stained copy of The Poetry of Richard Milhous Nixon.

At first, the tastefully designed volume—published by L.A.’s now-defunct Cliff House Books in 1974—seems genuine, right down to its deadpan “about the author” bio. But there’s a catch. While the Trickster dictated these verses, he did so unwittingly.

Nixon’s words, recorded by the infamous Oval Office taping system, were culled verbatim, then set in stanzas and given cheeky titles by Nixon’s obscure Boswell, Jack S Margolis. In Margolis’ expert hands, Nixon’s duplicitous and authoritarian ramblings take on an almost existential quality, a vulnerability not typically associated with the ex-president. And should anyone take offense, a suitably paranoid footnote to each and every page explains that “[t]he material in this collection comes entirely from The Watergate Transcripts. No words or punctuation have been added, omitted or changed in any way.”

Nixon‘s free-verse interludes have relevance two decades later; imagine the Whitewater scandal or the Iran-contra hearings in terms of “I Can’t Recall”:

You can say I don’t remember

You can say I can’t recall.

I can’t give any answer

To that

That I can recall.

Understandably, one of Nixon‘s recurring motifs is the ambiguous nature of truth, as in “The Position”:

The position is

To withhold

Information

And to cover up

This is

Totally true.

You could say

This is

Totally untrue.

And, though the volume contains no epiphany, Nixon tellingly concludes with “In the End,” a piece with a tone of—ahem—resignation:

In the end

We are going

To be bled

To death.

And in the end,

It is all going

To come out anyway.

Then you get the worst

Of both worlds.

Nixon once said, “Politics at its best is poetry, not prose.” He might have said the same of politics at its worst.