The four year long slow train wreck of Democrat
Joe Biden’s desperate attempt to inject legitimacy
into the Empire’s ever more flailing failing pseudo-
democracy even as he kept right on at continuing

The ongoing at least half century harrowing bind
neo-liberal austerity for the working class people
and most continuous neo-conservative forever war
against anything perceived as possibly threatening

U.S. hegemony anywhere on poor old planet Earth
has now brought us back certainly so, so inevitably
to a second ‘nasty’ outburst of that dread symptom
of the MAGA Trump hysterical (not funny) triumphal-

Ism asserting once again that the horror evil Empire
and the Grand Old Republic can not possibly continue
to co-exist in an ever more and more global world
that like sulphuric acid or water on witch dissolves

Nation-states into regional power blocks or leaves
them pasted together effigies of themselves across
continental divides into economic blocks that seek
independent finance and access to vital resources

For technological change so rapid that the old winners
ever so quickly & easily turn into the new bunch losers
while the poor old society of elder oldsters mismatched
with the new kids on the digital screens can not seem
To keep up much less even begin to simply adjust
where we are all going together driven like the cars
through these optical illusion common sense road
blocks and charging through a world of the swirling

Crowds of humans trying to find a way, anyway at all
through such a convoluted circular design labyrinth
keeps getting ever more more confusing and obtuse
and complex a flashing image rushing past in the dark

Night of shrieking horns and glaring headlights that
blind the startled babes and the old ones depleted
night vision as all these antiquated poor old human
cells vibrate wild with the accelerating rate of change.

 

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.