or the Femi-Nazis vs. Boy Brains on Propaganda

It’s impossible to imagine how bad it all really is. We’re constantly building
to the next stage of a crisis which as of yet still does not have a name, indeed
is handled as if it is one of the terrorists who must be secretly detained indefinitely
and interrogated and tortured, deprived of sleep for days on end, frozen and then
left in an oven and battered with foreign macho screaming sound, kept forever
as an enemy combatant and vaguely mentioned to scare all the people as if it
this thing, this crisis were a person as if we can solve it all by locking away someone
or shooting him in the eye or blowing all of them up with a missile or any of the horror
we’ve recreated over and over for over a decade now and as usual the Hippies were right
about just about everything, yas, marijuana is a medicine, and our current age civilization
can change the temperature of the whole planet, the American way of life is not sustainable
and imperialism is its own devilish reward and how much better off we would be if the agri-
business fields were turned into organic gardens, if we shed our cars like molting crabs
and suddenly found ourselves lithe and lean without them because I’m the only real
conservative you see since the Conservative Movement is made up entirely of apologists
for the Current Age Program of rapid radical industrialization which always dispossessed
the poor people from the land and creates a seething horde of wage slaves living
at subsistence level, why they would reinstitute slavery if possible and there we are again
with more slaves than in the days of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Trades,
and they hold a mirror up at arm’s length and looking intently at it for guidance
put their foot down in defiance petal to the metal while meanwhile the real,
the movement has been growing so far underground for way more than a century
and roots are extended out the edges of the universe way, way down in the soil
of the void, it erupts from the collapse of the subduction of the colliding tectonic
social plates while being right about everything never helps, never helps anything,
no, somehow all by itself it all builds from the bottom, down there where live the peons
and foot soldiers who were kicked out by their families or just split off by sub-atomic
collisions, they spin in circles and spiral away, they got caught on photographic plates
and the observer disappeared in the flash, alone all alone in this cold icebox they
suddenly were a buzzing electronic hive in a super-heated stew of a cosmic sea where
we keep waking up to discover we simply, so simply don’t have any idea where we are
or how we actually got here when each new link of an expanding network uncovers
the paradox of an expanding world accelerating away from itself past the speed of light.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.