The whole world is inside out
like when we were little kids
and woke up from our nap
and went outside with our T-shirts turned
inside out and we didn’t even know it.

Richard Nixon’s silent majority
turned into Reagan’s moral majority
and they’ve made destroying the planet
into a hyper-religious fetish.

It’s their right to drive huge vehicles
and spew fumes over the landscape.
It’s their duty to turn our world
into their very own private profit center.
They plan to live forever.
They can buy their way out of anything.
Even death is reduced to a trick of the genes.
That’s why we must blast off for Mars.
Space is the ultimate commanding height.
Conservative means they can do whatever they want
and to hell with everything and everybody else.

The whole world is inside out
just like when we were little kids
and woke up from our nap
and went outside with our T-shirts turned
inside out and didn’t even know it.

 

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.