The Great Blue wave and the Red Tide Undertow
                    And the Movement

How many times did they tell us “don’t swim against the rip tide
swim across the current to where it inevitably heads back to shore”
but now the rip tide is a red tide and you better not swim it at all
if you want to come out the way you went in everywhere they’ve
deployed their chemical soup of nitrates and phosphates and pesti-
herbi-cide petro interventions that turn the coasts and banks and water
in-between to dead zones all the stuff they put on the fields and all the stuff
we dump on “our” lawns and the cloud from the caravans of cars and emissions
from all the refineries and the spills from those pipelines so that all that happens
from a great blue wave even a tsunami of unprecedented scale is the algae bloom
agricultural run-off oil spill of petro chemical concoction washes over our flooded
habitations, our homes and leaves us in the growing deadly mess left there by the
bi-partisan war party and the largest ever fossil fuel emissions military industrial
complex and its long, indeed perpetual forever endless war the more they lose
the more they throw good after bad like great waves on the beach washing
away in the red rip tide waiting there just waiting there for all to see.

 

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.