There are people now who drive around old towns of America
making youtube.com videos of the devastation left behind in
‘Rust Belt’ by the post-industrial age digital revolution cities
like Detroit and Flint and Saginaw and Bay City where I was
Born and grief up and returned to Michigan where my parents
and then my brother once and still lives all the way down to S.W.
Pennsylvania where I met both the women I married and went
to college at the old Normal School-California now university
then just a small state college with an amazing English faculty
of language which I now struggle to understand how this once
mighty industrial base built up over a century of migrating folk
and long, long hard days of incredibly dangerous even toxic work
poisonous substance until here we are so unable to make enough
tanks and bombs to keep the Ukraine cannons firing at anywhere
near the same rate as the Russians as the new Leopard tanks that
they scrounged about from the Netherlands and so many others
go up in a barrage in new mass death Ukraine offensive and as the
government in Kiev dismantles (democratically) its own judiciary
and deploys economic straitjacket of corporate caesar policy of
all for the oligarchs both justice and wealth and none ever for the
people and we see none of this on the mainstream media of, by, &
for the empire of war that has devastated hundreds of millions of
lives abroad and left America a shuttered, crippled technological
hyper state of permanent war machine uber alles that hollows out
the nation and ships its people to the coasts where they sit, to wait
for the big one whether by nuclear bombs or 6th Great Extinction
oh, life will survive but people, oh, not so much 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.