The electric network is not the same
as increasingly automated industrial grid
but somehow we cannot separate them
(or ourselves) from this 21st Century hubris
we see as the 1960’s establishment morphs
into full blown corporate cat person-hood
and Agent Orange head (in the White House)
goes full bore with the New Jim Crow
which looks more and more like the old Jim Crow
all the time the Federalist Society attempts
to pretend we’re all so post-racial any mention
of race is racist in country that has apportioned
slavery and freedom, and , yes, life and death
on racial basis for about 400 hundred years
now still ongoing the Supreme Court that had
decided black people had no rights that need be
respected by any white men uses now the 14th
amendment to gift free speech to corporate persons
(already equated with money, money, money)
and there we all there watching the cover up
(in plain sight) in the form of prep school jock
hard drinking bully angry hurt privilege face
contorted in injured Mr. Sir male wounded rage
the face they showed us over and over since
9/11 revealed all our helpless vulnerability and
the Nation jumped the shark in less than a decade
and half of torture , assassination, dirty forever wars
free market fundamentalist occupations and all
funded by the most high-handed of fishy finances
of real estate speculators, and hedge fund manipulators
of micro-second transactions front running institutional
investors so that there we are watching slow motion
judicial coup each its final crystal state of ruling class
hubris in that face that one true entitlement macho male
face of all the bully baddy boys jumping on the backs
of little girls just trying to go to school, to survive
with all these goony testosterone brain stem men
whining and crying and in this self-righteous fit
right there before us in that one creepy screen face.

 

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.