Another Why I Hate cars Poem

The Living Dead was always just a voodoo doll
From some obscure island in the Caribbean Sea
Until some up and coming filmed The Night of
The Living Dead just down the Pennsylvania
Turn Pike when I lived in Fayette County, Pa.

Even this youthful brush with mindless threat
Failed to alert me to the strange virulent virus
Whose symptom had somehow just emerged
So close to the State College system I found
With vets like me in school on the G.I. bill

Since then Vietnam vets were still all suspect
Ready to go off at the sound of a loud backfire
Or the churn of helicopter blades that chopped
Their way through anything alive in their way
Always another alarm and hectic emergency

And even before the CREEP movement managed
To re-elect that strange gawky inhuman thing
That waved its arms as if it were a lurching doll
Somehow I already intimated the rain forest dis-ease
And read of the take over of vital rain forest lungs

That gasped in shock at the advancing intruders
So intent on what they had no capacity to know
Ready to do anything you could possibly imagine
And all for nothing, all for an arcane compulsion
To make everyone so impossibly just like them

Until now those of us still alive again after all
Long rides on dark roads so way far out there
In the country hills which you cannot hope to see
Loom over it all while we are still riding, riding
On twisting roads where anything could appear
In the headlights senseless, unstoppable, advance.

 

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.