When the absolutely worst possible is merchandised and sold as divine
          intervention
and the whole nation is anesthetized in a air-tight vacuum of growing
          disinformation
where each catch-phrase is a buzz saw code drawn from all the bloated body
          effects
of the fossil-fuelish fools gold policies: the polluted food growing from
          poisoned land
planted by toxic minds more interested in real estate speculation than human
          health,
the healthcare system set up to maximize administrative costs and steal huge
          slices
of working people’s wealth in a great generational spend down with an energy
          grid over-
run by competing combine cabals using publicly constructed infrastructure to
          just milk
the public as they make jokes about those poor old grannies on social security
          Ha! Ha!
Ha! they said about a defense budget bigger than the combined expenditure of
          its ten
closest competitors yet never adequate to a need that just grows after all the
          incidents
that somehow multiply with the Empire’s hegemony, while the kids, well the
          kids keep
paying more and more with more and more of them in each class and teachers
          paid less
by people who act like public education should just cease to exist when a
          Culture of Life
wages elective wars, and therefore writes its own laws, institutes military
          tribunals to wage
capital crime, suppress dissent, indeed just makes up its own rules of war as it
          violates
international law while the commentators gargle, the press pontificates, the
          holy roller
judges give long long consideration, the bureaucrats fume in the back seat
          as process
withers the environment dies and the law is a broken thing but nobody says
           “It’s against the law”
when the only reason the president hasn’t broken the law is that he wrote
          himself a note
saying the president doesn’t have to obey the law since nobody says, “It’s
          against the law.”

 

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.