In my poc-ket I have a bronze belt buckle
brought to me by my Godson’s Armenian
wife all the way from their trip to her home
from the era of the so gone Soviet Union

It bears a bright communist hammer and
sickle symbol of all the workers that are
both agricultural but especially industrial
I remember how once it was so often used

As emblem of dictatorship and a tyranny
the communist movement so demonized
in Cold War fear of nuclear armageddon
which had us all in the shadow of Sputnik

And science and technology so advanced
class learning de rigueur mode existential
indeed existentialism its very self a thing
when our whole world could just be ended

In a flash of brilliant, thundering nuclear
apocalypse once those pesky Russians got
the bomb(s) the U.S. that is us was not any
longer the sole nuclear super-stupor power

And out on asphalt playground I found out
that “atomic” couldn’t hold a single candle
to the “hydrogen” bomb blowing the Bikini
beach into this devastated, shattered atoll
How they all, everyone used to laugh about
the sad remnants of the old commie sects
the old, now gone hate America first crew
of Marxism-Leninism-Maoists out on street

Protesting the C.I.A./ USAID coup and regime
secret change through the power of an empire
that went ballistic after quick precipitous fall
of the Soviet Socialist Republics and then the

Shock therapy neo-liberalism that was applied
that lowered the Russian life expectancy there
as the Chicago School economists tried to turn
Russia into mere collection of colonial provinces

And fought a long war of medieval siege sanctions,
coups and regime change all over the world since.

 

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.