To my adolescent mind it dream seemed
like the old John Birch Society must be
there on the ballot back in that election
of the attack ad with the lovely little girl
with a flower before the final fatal blast
of the nuclear Armageddon Apocalypse
the rapture in a very literal mass suicide
a cold shake in the dark night of the soul

Chained to the wall of the tired patriarch’s
dungeon depths of an Operation Paperclip
and the gestapo go, went gone oh, so Stazi
the Nazi intelligence so ready to neutralize
all those commie fighters of the resistance
social democrats already turned neo-liberal
in this Marshall Plan world reconstruction
of a devastated self shattered old Europe

We just didn’t know how really truly lucky
we were when years of this terrifying youth
became days of struggling along inventing
a way of life where everyone then just Poof!
had to have a car or you were nowhere and
yet somehow we all were housed and then
the holidays were fat table breaking feasts
the bellies burgeoning into these gigantic

Hills bursting between the sloping slouching
beltlines and again insufficient tight T-shirts
as Johnson won election in a total landslide
and, then immediately after the inauguration
invaded Vietnam with eventually hundreds of
thousands troops in just two short years while
there I was registering for the draft senior year
and dropping out of college to be just on 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.