Early memory looks in from way outside
sequence or even any order known at all
and exists in time at once simultaneous
instantaneous small child in a big world
where a self without borders can overflow
into this slo-mo day by day of synthesis

Of what we almost know and we but intuit
legions of marching divisions and nothing
portending these long days of emptiness
a desert in the wake of affluent age years
of social deconstruction and a bright blaze
signaling us from the way it supposed to be:

So many things we can’t track what we have
or must have and if you can’t count the toys
what winner is there ever in any of the games
we see how far we are from our original birth
while death stares into the depth of our skull
and our poor bodies don’t know what to do

But watch the Honeymooners progressing on
into the Flintstones and then the Jetson family
as Richard Milhouse becomes Ronald Reagan
oh, ray guns Zap! Zap! Zap! Zap? thus we know
this isn’t the American dream from so long ago
no, it’s just a voice singing the Empire’s Over.

 

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.