Intrinsic, race and sexism of saying to a black mother of two, six months pregnant
with her third child, that her husband killed and captured or was it captured and killed?
in the middle of Saharan Africa on a mission first described as routine reconnaissance
then not so much but nobody seems to know what’s going on except we have special
operations in so many countries, 49 in Africa, 172 around the world’s territories and
countries so when they say to the grieving Mom (what the general said was said to him)
“he (the buck sergeant) knew what he signed up for” “he was in the place he wanted
to be” “he was with the people he wanted to be with” don’t you think he just might
have rather have been home with his six months pregnant wife in fact why wasn’t he
home with his two babies 3 and six years old playing house with his daughters we now
finally see like we never saw before crying on her mother as her mother cries on the coffin
of her husband that contains a body she will never see because “they” won’t let her since
(apparently) that’s how bad it is what’s left of him, and the general, the one that was made
Head of Homeland (Aryan?) Security so he could justify mass immigrant arrests saying
it was a round up of criminals , the same general who defended force feeding hunger strikers
at Guantanomo with extra-large tubes to try to coerce the end of the hunger strikes
now as chief of staff to the president? presides over ending the force feedings entirely
at least until the detainees show signs of organ failure thus further endangering the lives
of men held for over 15 years with no charges, much less a trial and some of them are still
just poor smucks who happened to get swept up in the round up after 9/11 and one of them
has a teen-age child he’s never seen because it was still in the womb when he was picked up
driving his cab from Pakistan and traded for cash to the U.S. (that is us) and he ends up
in the torture mills Bagram then Guantanomo and the generals directly responsible for all
this war crime crap are the adults in the room for white supremacist Agent Orange Head
in the White house who invariably attracts every racist sexist homophobic islamaphobic
monster in the vicinity like a loathsome lodestone into his malignant narcissistic orbit.

 

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.