There’s never been enough time in work-a-holic America there
where Protestant ethnic gone Capital, oh, Das Kapital Capital
this huge accumulation of all the many things we have to carry
through an ever more wounded world mining pits pumping out
pollution wells of toxic water and fine dust just percolating and
everywhere hemorrhage of slow death flooding our environment
the cycle of air and earth and water become planetary heating
orgy holocaust threatening the middle a bulging spinning globe
on its rotisserie of daily rotation light and dark, day and night
sunrise and sunset longest day to longest night so out of time
the change of thousands of years in a few short decades upon
us while our “leaders”, our politicians, “our” elected leaders
keep doubling, tripling, quadrupling down, down the ultimate
in this out of time outside time like those old beatnick BEATS
understood time indeed said they knew time this reclamation
oh, of the body, oh, just in time time changeover transformed
time of all of us together right there in the flow of that river
time that captures the very time, time that is all of us time
time, time, time-time time now is time past is surely the time
that is time of NO PEACE NO FUTURE so NO PEACE NO FUTURE
TIME, TIME, TIME-TIME TIME so TIME,TIME, TIME-TIME TIME ……

 

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.