Crisis is the great distiller of the extraneous
from truth but it makes it more real to watch
as so many are misled as they cling to reality
already long gone if it ever really did exist all
I hear myself say, when it’s really happening
right now a new way of life in the midst of a
death of the old, this always happens, always
had, and yet we see this clinging to what has
died, needed to die, turning change into this
conspiracy conservatism supposed agency of
saving the old traditions just hasten the most
radical of changes possible, resisting what is
already by fiat done, just the way it is, with a
high pressure fire hose of decades torrents of
outright lies, fabulous misinformation all built
on hate & sectarian isolation, such deception
you’d say it must be pure satanic except they
already got monopoly on all them old demonic
words polluting hell conspiracy to take away
“natural” gas burners, oh, after burner indeed
oh, how prophetic, a prophecy Kingdom Come.

 

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.