Johnny Rocko has nothing to compare to these gangsta-banksta
robbing the whole nation with their black robed consigliere riding
shotgun on their regular runs that ride rough shod over all the
efficiencies of monopolistic industrial theft on planetary scale.

In fact they have a lock on scale itself and they sweep the sea clean
of competition and just about everything that ever lived there (once)
while the people, well, the people get to sell everything especially
them selves below the gross domestic product and their kids can
always be soldiers and sailors airmen and space troopers.

All these crimes could be dismissed with one single decision
of the Corporate Supremes and Corporate Caesar can be counted on
to bring the case and his Attorney General will take care of those
so foolish as to blow the whistle except it’s all gone so global that
we are always watching everything they do including them watching
all of us watching them.

Ah, alas the potty mouth press will call the kit and kaboodle kettle black
and somehow black will again be bad and the hurricane of the storm surge
will roll over a drought of imagination and no one will be allowed to say
the obvious about the gratuitous wars and the corrupt occupations and
the weight of all those invisible hands running, running in the darkness
with a knife between the legs and another under the scrotum and in our
most intimate places when we’re all trapped on the boat together and unless
we manage to get along we just might sink with all hands lost far out to sea.

 

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.