or Some Things Never Go Away

I come from almost 4 weeks outside the U.S.A. U.S.A. U.S.A. bubble
of corporate media spin, spin, spin and a Spectre is haunting the maze
of vinyl strips on waist high posts that makes us go back and forth
back and forth across the great room just to spread out our number
so we won’t stack up at the touch screens whose only real function
is to get us to commit again that we have no contraband food, plants
or animals and to record our pictures exhausted, sleep deprived, travel
blasted for the surveillance state and somehow already between it all
the vinyl stripping and the surveillance cameras there is a Spectre
haunting America, indeed the World right there in Logan Airport
Watergate is waiting, yes has been there all along waiting this third rate
burglary as they say a band aide on the cancer sore of the war crimes
of Vietnam, the assassination of the Diem brothers engineered by the C.I.A.
with Henry Cabot Lodge as U.S. ambassador so I remember the rhyme
                         (Boston land of beans and cod
                         Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots
                         And the Cabots speak only to God)
that is the “secret” bombing of Laos and Cambodia, agent orange chemical
warfare only you can end forests deforestation, the secret Phoenix Program
of torture and assassination, the Tiger Cage detentions, the sales of heroin
to finance militia allies, the genocidal war on “the little yellow people” and
my platoon on Okinawa actually provided the radio teletype operators for U.S.
secret operations in Laos so one day one guy just appeared on his once empty
forever bunk and the sergeants just left his sad PTSD ass alone in the morning
when the rest of us went out to formation for report and I came home knowing
Richard Millhouse Nixon’s “secret” plan to end the war would keep it going
for many more years and tens of thousands of U.S. deaths and millions more
dead little yellow people while Nixon would spy on everyone and use the war
to deploy the Internal Revenue Service and F.B.I. and C.I.A. against dissidents
who were locked up by the war on drugs and array of political dirty tricks
deployed against protesting veterans for peace and activists like Black Panther
Fred Hampton, author of the original Rainbow Coalition as he tried to ally
with Hispanic and other organizers for which they assassinated him as he slept
one night in Chicago and the U.S. Attorney there and the F.B.I. and Chicago
Police who shot Fred in his sleep all got away with it because Watergate, you
see, Watergate was just a third rate burglary (of the Democratic National Com.)
and the free fire zones and reconnaissance by fire and dropping a grenade in
the Hooch to make sure no one was left alive but the bodies never stay buried
and the blood keeps screaming deep from the Earth and Watergate won’t go
away even now as all the real crimes of Vietnam and its domestic suppression
of the anti-war movement are drone strikes in seven different countries and
Indonesian mass murderers business partners of agent (Russian?) orange head
in the White House and the Nobel Peace Prize winners’ war on whistle blowers
still ongoing and the woman who ran the torture site in Thailand is Deputy
Director of the C.I.A. and the Deputy Attorney General who presided over the
creation of the torture memos and deployment of the (un)Patriot Act is fired
as F.B.I. head for being too independent although initially they pretend it was
because he dropped the bomb on Hillary (Clinton) whose smithereens must be
there somewhere spectral adrift haunting the nether world between national
                                                                   borders.

 

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.