It’s one of those despicable weeds
that you can grab hold of the whole
top part but the long tap roots goes
so deep it snaps right off near surface
to leave the subterranean structure
still intact waiting to grow again…

There’s the ‘father’ of “modern policing”
August Vollmer born of German parents
19 years old learned counter-insurgency
in the Philippines as U.S. (that is still us)
put down their independence movement
to replace Spain as imperial colonial power…

Which immediately reminds of history
of torture in U.S. jails and prisons that
came up in debate around the practice
of ‘enhanced interrogation’ in the war
on terrorism post 9/11 when the U.S. got
waterboarding from Spain’s Philippines…

Which makes a direct line to George Floyd
demonstrations that went world wide when
his public suffocation was just video relayed
to everyone but almost 4 years later police
kill 20% more people each year than then
as Israel’s Gaza Genocide is live-streamed…

But, of course, Israel trained death squads
that killed whole Mayan villages in Guatemala
in the 1980’s dirty wars spawned by the U.S.
C.I.A. engineered coup in ‘54 (just another
Dulles Bros. operation) comes ‘now’ prophecy
when Israel invaded/carpet bombed S. Beirut…

And allowed ‘christian’ nationalists to massacre
whole villages there, too, just like the settlers
now tearing up whole convoys of lifesaving food…

 

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.