Everywhere I go I carry a couple paper airplanes
Each contemplative fold ever so carefully aligned
So that each will cut the air clean in its own lane
And loop de loop to glide to Earth in line divine

This childish practice seems to enrage some men
So I must in play be stealing their lost innocence
And launching it as unbounded symbol of the pen
Information revolution has made of our lives since

Our 21st century forever wars and the Patriot Act
So soon acted as white supremacist ethno state
The new Jim Crow become all too real top down fact
The purveyors of freedom cult create fascist state

And religious liberty as excuse for exclusive hate
Whatever happened to vaunted institutional strength
The People’s Government revealed as oligarchic fate
Paroxysms of environmental peril thru nation’s length.

 

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.