Just as the littlest one tells us she is fighting the Invisible Dragon on the apex of the playground arches
my old poster from the 70’s has just been published in Stone’s Throw as the back cover of the continuation
of founder Jack Power’s Sidewalk Stethoscope series from so long ago back in the olden time days.

I can suddenly see everything and indeed all that must be done even as it is just as obvious how difficult
it will be to do I it all. The conservatives are so sure that growing consensus of cold war triumphalism is forever
even as the hugest technological transformation yet ricochets through the social structure and the world of the spirit
becomes ever more literal even as the absolute material world is swallowed by a gaping whole of nothingness.

There’s the littlest one changing clothes every time she changes her mood. There’s a holy new story up at the apex
of the tripod playground apparatus where she pokes the Dragon we cannot see and tells us she is fighting the Invisible.
(Except it sounds like “Visible Dragging” to me because she is 3 and one half and I never had a great ear to begin with.)

Overseas, that land of my youth where mysteriously they long ago used to hate us for bringing them freedom
(and human rights) the bombs are falling again on Iraq and now Syria and still, of course, Yemen and Somalia
and Pakistan and Afghanistan, the AfPak border, the new Caliphate, the gateway to the Red Sea and Suez Canal.
The Tomahawks flare off ship decks and the Hellfires rain down from the droning drones. It’s all digital as I work out
analogue antidote concrete me Mr. Modern Mime still exploring, still elaborating the performance art counterculture
movement of the last great crisis as the current age crisis deepens and goes into the second stage inevitably overtaking
the failed leadership which time after time can’t get one thing right with all their expertise, all their technology which
only creates more chaos, ever increasing systematic instability: governments which do not govern, economic systems
that bubble and bust, financial order that concentrates wealth in a top heavy structure that skewers a social space
that swirls around us in a Global Dragon of yin/yang connections where ever more wealth unrecorded flies at light
speed through shadow banks Dragon of the New World Order really Dragon of Ancient Oriental Energy flashing global
energy that wants to be and become as old world Dragon of Terror and enchanted virgins waiting to be devoured still
rules the world with bombs and beheadings. Oh, yes heads will roll in Chop Chop Square and in the desert they made
of the Fertile Crescent and bombs blow on the tectonic plates of civilizations while the people of the ‘culture of life’
know it’s just the way it’s always been while the seekers of the renaissance just want to mitigate complete climate

change
and

a little girl at the apex of the tripod playground apparatus fights the Dragon of Revolutionary Times only she can see.

 

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. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.