After afar watch of the MAGA a counter-revolution
deliberately destroying our America as we’ve known
it my entire life really from even before I was born
all the way back to the New Deal Roosevelt reforms

The forty hour week, time and half overtime work,
unemployment and workers injury compensation
actually the demands of at least 3 full generations
of workers struggling for their right to organize &

Collectively bargain with their employers, the only
way workers have ever achieved anything except
this take it or leave it fait accompli from their oh,
so bouchy bosses, yes de baas, as the Dutch in old

New Amsterdam cum New York put it on Wall Street
they built to keep out the natives who paddled up
river from the bay, that beautiful harbor hard stone
foundations just right for a coming sheaf of towers

I find myself back home in such a very strange place
retired, await for the next shoe to drop in the rat race.

 

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.