Sitting on the front porch of your mansion
reading thoughts in each other’s faces
as the long gray lines of the rain clouds
march over the yet unmowed rough lawn

We talk on over the great generational gap
created by depression and World War II
you realizing the doctors with their bypass
and pills may have actually cut your options

In the name of short-lived relief (and profit)
while I can know that what is done is done
and whatever you will not get your veins back
even as much as you rage against the addicts

You’ll never get their young heart and lungs
in exchange for your taking on their addiction
but as individually isolated as this may seem
collectively we’re all devoured by Minotaur

Of the drugs, money and driven consumption
consuming to be consumed and consumption
raging through the capitols and the populace
alike as if there never was any hope tomorrow

& certainly no grand old party/ loyal opposition
that will somehow even begin to save the day
and change the long pattern of imperial empire
into the strong heart arteries of born again life.

 

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.