Scapegoat trials of kids who never ever
should have been there in the first place
drear on while Freedom Medals photo op
their way into the hands of the central intelligence
that invented the weapons of mass destruction,
the chief administrator who fired the army
that became the insurgency, the defense chief
who has our army lost and surrounded in a desert of hate.

Either we impeach and try our out-of-control
international war criminal president
or we cease to be a system of laws.
If the president can make a finding
that torture is whatever he defines it as
then nothing and everything becomes torture.

Back at the old annual school committee public meeting
there was always someone and sometimes more than 1 someone
who had to get up and say something like this:
“You know some of us don’t have children
and we don’t see why we have to pay
all these property taxes for the schools!”
Afterwards my mother would mutter something
about how she didn’t want to be critical
but do those crackpots always have to …
The crackpot Republican party is firmly in power
The Demo-can’t- do nothings totally in tow.
The courts have been packed
with the opinions of the Oligarchs
and the press is a corporate lap dog.

 

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.