I come from the wedding where the groom takes the bride’s name
and find again that the native Americans as per usual have named
the waterfall of six hundred stairs Tumbling Water while the news
there was all Foxy even as at least forty years of U.S. policy (really
everything since the Fat Boy fell) blows up in our own faces just as
a Children’s Crusade ‘invades’ our southern border and the repug-
ni-rats (them selves) in puritanical hissy fit over sexual trafficking
have hoisted them selves petard and written into law that the kids/
waifs all have a right to a hearing before a magistrate to plead for
sanctuary decades of coups, death squads & torture chambers and
abusive trade policy & drug war have left whole countries in power
of dealer wheeler, wheeler dealers and as the prime minister of Iraq
who just won re-election by selling himself as that tough guy who
could control everything suffers complete military defeat in Anbar
and beyond, two regions in total chaos one next door the other on
the other side of the world but connected by a same Colonel Steel
who set up torture “platforms” in both places if two decades apart
and the death squads are out again in both regions while Israel lays
bomb eggs on besieged Palestinians hunkered down on Gaza Strip
& I’m flying back from a wedding and the Tumbling Water of a fall
that has the spirit of the Cherokee damp on my face in the mist of
that falling water with my grandkids playing musical airplane seats
beside me and a young graduate student on that other side of me is
on the way to a conference in Boston he tells me that he gets most
of his statistical techniques from private industry because that’s just
where the money is so it attracts all the best minds to figure arcane
algorithms with which to use the people’s information to manipulate
and lead them for the profit of corporations and so there it is again
the all one thing that’s destroying the oh, so whole world and here’s
this young fellow, working above grade with post-docs & professors
trying to understand the structure of cells (holistically) studying the
system with cutting edge digital technology while all the best minds
are figuring out how to get us to buy more stuff to pollute our planet
and which the young grad student takes completely for granted while
my granddaughter clamors for me and climbs over the airplane seat
back to curl up in her brother’s seat as he faults over to his Mom in the
back and the little one covers herself with the red Delta airline blanky
next to me that she wants to take home so I remember how she and
the other little ones danced at the wedding reception and I intone the
Tennessee Waltz all the connections are there ALL ONE THING there.

 

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.