After long day meeting and serving at Monday Lunch at church and riding train and bus
Out to the ‘burbs to pick up grandkids at school and coming back into town foot and train
On time to attend Stone Soup Poetry (I used to do days like this over and over day in week out)
But now I fall asleep early to wake as 70 year old Hippie in the dark looking out the window
At 2AM to see mist swirling off the melting snow rain falling in mid-January so I sit in the dark
With little black and white tuxedo cat, Mittens, and flick on the TV to hear what is going on
In the world, after all, I hear the main lame stream media “the Russians hacked the election”
So over and over I flip to the History Channel and discover a documentary from old files
(Finally released) about the C.I.A. coup in 1954 in Guatemala that over threw about the only
Elected president they ever had or would have for many decades in huge “fake news” miss-
Information assault that convinced the people of that poor country that a massive invasion
Was happening to them so they fled their homes, the capitol shut down and the generals whose
Forces had defeated the main mercenary pincer action believed pre-recorded radio reports
(broad cast from a secret location) that they had lost and abandoned the elected government
To the C.I.A. and its designated coup leader as Guatemala City was smoke bombed by F-47
US fighter planes and ten days later the C.I.A. inaugurated a new regime the first of many such
Military coups that would eventually carry out a massive genocide of the Indigenous Mayan
People supported by Ronald Rayguns ZAP! In the 1980’s whole villages massacred just one
Small part of the horror that came to be called the Iran-contra affair (neatly labeled and stashed
Away no one ever really held to account cover up in plain sight) but now the Russians have
“hacked” the election I hear on my dark TV which lost its picture months ago as I sit in the dark
And the President Select has Trumped us all with his Reality TV reality insistent, incessant,
Obsession tweets, his genital grabbing comments fact free zone and in the dark I hear “The
                                         Russians Hacked the Election”
                                                             Oh, Yeah.

 

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.