the King of Siam

Just as hammer in hand turns every object
into nail to slam bam! when you and world
are in need everything to hand becomes just
exactly the very thing to bridge the gap full
in the hole you go round and round, oh, so
total profound a blind man in hole of mole
cartilage skeleton of slithering octopus slips
through the thinnest crevice piercing peeps
bouncing blow back from all the real walls
and pinpointing prey in the dark night seas
where debt ceiling is back deep dark place
hotel California famous actor with big ass ax
so down, down down there we go way down
to Kerouac’s gritty picaresque America of On
the Road waiting rooms diners rented rooms
hopped up used cars and jalopies transporting
them across decades of growing crisis Alfred
Hitchcock need dimple chin sophisticated actor
Cary Grant terrorized over and over in this so
Technicolor Panavision moderne world then
brand new U.N. building in skyscraper mega
big city NYC empire of those financial elites
in germ form the fascism in our very faces &
every way we turn, turn twisting in the wind
between great teeth in the expanding chaos
                            IT SELF

 

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.