or the last thing in Pandora’s box is
the most dangerous, that is HOPE

The dread election already selection
of the ever more endless succession
of ever worser and worser politicians
of compartmental party sycophants
of rich and famous genocidal factions
of Empire fractious shards of division
sharp social ground glass and steel bits
in the whips that drive us mental slaves
who exist in the guts of pull, pull, pull
you miserable loafers you get out and
vote to save the Democracy you’ve not
ever had this machine of the machine
political state where, yes, vote or else
you know what you’ll get you, you-you
you know that elections always do have
consequences and that you can pretend
it doesn’t matter but as facts down on
the ground get worse and worse the airy
formulations of bureaucrat officialdom
just continue to grow ever more scary
and precarity grows into pillar of abuse
that falls ever so hard on us here below …

 

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.