for Hokusai@MFA

The wave building up the incline
has broken and white water crests,
rushes onto that once distant shore
ocean boils over, spill overflows land:

All that was firm is swept away, wealth
once so absolute is ephemeral as night
and day is never so long as we’ve known
a dim light in oncoming darkness flickers

This creature we’ve been searching for now
and so long comeback to repeat its poor self
hoping to block out that burning ultraviolet
lite with “chemtrails” that are only faint mist

Of condensed water guarded by absolute right
to guns when as any rational actor so does know
your right to shoot up the night just ends there
at our bodies, torn off limbs, decapitated heads

And headless, heedless nation-state fundamentals
this 21st Century curated cult of Redemptive Violence
occupies the social wheelhouse with this moral vacuum
a vast suction waiting to pull us under or is it just in.

 

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.