If you don’t have something nice to say
don’t say anything at all (they used to say)
but niceness can leave you all alone
in a terrible place kind of like you know
the food fight in the exceptional nation’s capitol
slow motion coup (been going on for decades)
meets reality show host of elite unmasking
as deep state roaches scatter from any light
torture, assassination, and, oh, mass surveillance
keep poking up from all the old investigations
and the current age nominations of lawyers
who wrote memos to put those policies in place
and the place can get absolutely nothing done
except what the billionaire oligarchs all together
push, push, push, push Great Bubble record setting
levels of debt, debt, debt more debt teetering
on the abysmal abyss, jeez, we look into the black hole
of smarmy souls, multitudinous incarnations Unholy
Alliance of Puritans in bed with Mighty Mammon
Commodification of the wholly, holy Common
Privatized property treated as Divine Providence
it doesn’t matter what we do to that sexy slut
Mother Earth is just Satanic New Age Idolatry
because the Rapture will steal you away just in time
long before the servo mechanism consumer culture
of death through legal and economic pincer action
destroys the goose that lays the golden egg of life
                    life, life, life.

 

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.