as they used to call it

After visiting with a poet friend at the Star Mkt.
outdoor seating for Starbucks I walk on back up
to the Red Line train on my old grocery shopping route
from when I had lived on Savin Hill for over 18 years past
where the Globe Newspaper had printed its rag for decades and
I could still look into the press room area but (of course) the presses
were gone just these big empty bays where once a mighty industrial
engine turned and I knew this would be the case because I’d been
at demonstrations for Julian Assange publisher who put the Iraq
and Afghanistan memos on line & is being held in extradition
proceedings in London’s Belmarsh Prison as the U.S. (that’s us)
seeks to bring him to America on charges that would put him
in supermax in Colorado for “terrorists” for a full 175 years
and his father and brother came to Boston Common
so human to protest but then we had been in front
the new Globe offices huge glass and steel such a
social inequality skyscraper chanting at those
tinted windows behind which they called cops
on us even as this is the 50th anniversary
of publishing of Pentagon Papers which
are the history rhymes not repeats
bookends of current age time bind
arc of war crimes of Vietnam
genocide cover up so direct
connect to assassination
and torture in Iraq
(and Afghanistan)
documented by
our troops
published
by Julian
and the
NYTimes
which owns the Globe now
(I guess).

 

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.