So they’ve just stopped talking about Gaza
and it’s all about the two old candidates now
who have been foreordained since long before
either declared the presidential predestination

So we are expected to sit by totally bedazzled
by this mass media sleight of hand dirty trick
of look over here don’t notice those children
buried under the bouncing rubble, just don’t

Even look at the little limbs removed without
anesthesia, the tiny bodies dying in cold halls
the mass graves full of the cloth wrapped little
forms stacked in these hasty shallow trenches

This whole city of people in their living millions
camping in the southern border port declared
the very next subject of deadly invasion to drive
them all (apparently) out into cold empty desert

But the candidates are out there cavorting again
look! Look! over there over here there they go, go
again, oh what are they wearing this year again,
what cloak can cover their old naked evil selves.

 

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.