Everywhere at once two clandestine wings
black site global torture detention
and free trade zone shadow banking
black market guns, drugs and sex
kidnapping death squads in 172 countries
autocrat dictators and kleptocrat kings
Dons, capos, crime head bosses
Murder Incorporated Union Gangsters
Payday Loans and loan sharking
money laundering condo casinos
Reason Magazine Family Research Council
Pro-life Death Penalty Movement
astro turf organized buses for them
Occupy gets pepper sprayed in the face
and shot in the head with tear gas canister
(thank you Barack Obama, old Obama
who helped put a new generation of nukes
in the hands of Agent Orange Head in the White House
as he sabotaged efforts to create binding contracts
on Green House gases as his Secretary of State
went around Earth selling hydro fracking
ICE deports two and one half million people
back to countries controlled by warlords
created by 7 decades of military coups
and USA USA backed regime changes)

and of course Nixon/Reagans/Clintons
Bushes/Obama’s ruthless war on drugs
to go with Drone Ranger’s Killer Tuesdays
all one thing, ALL ONE THING
mobster gangsta crime family
evangelical way theocrats
gansta banks fund global Ponzi schemes
free market libertarian guns, drugs, sex
deep state terror techno bureaucrats
endless occupations and counter-insurgency
(for the insurgencies caused by the occupations)
17 combined oxymoron intelligence agencies
that keep telling us the Russians did it
(in the Trump Russian Investigation):
“the Russians hacked the election”
where the Repugs strip and flip enough voters
so they can make it close enough
so they can steal the election
and, there it is, not a failure of democracy
but the complete absence of democracy
the competing frantic contending wings
of the old clandestine operations
funded by drug dealing and
spies in alliance with criminal gang
insurgent ethnic cleansing, racial putsches
encircling the poor Earth in one final
Awful Act of Enclosure

 

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.