We the U.S. (us) seem incapable of learning
since after all the military industrial center
has studied cover up in plain sight and now
for my entire three quarter century of a life
how can you learn from what you deny ever
happened no wonder there is such ignorance
in the American people when all our leaders
have surgically separated foreign/domestic
policy always a huge bloated ugly presence
“the security state” in this oh so devastated
space room of veterans “benefits”&“money”
for the poor who consistently are consigned
to nowhere as if they don’t exist somehow it’s
all their own fault what were they doing any
way in that humvee inadequately armored or
on the base or someplace just out back where
food stamps could never reach them and still
would never have been enough after all really
there’s never enough tanks and jet bombers
while those kids well they’re starving all over
the world one famine after another and there’s
always wars and always famine one dead kid
after another war, war, war if only we could so
remember what they tried so hard to never let
be known about us (the U.S.) that all one thing…

 

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.