Where is Clarence Darrow now with his furrows
for eyebrows boring thru our selves to provoke
dread answer from poor William Jennings Bryant
orator of the Golden Cross that was so crucifying
The working man as the once continental empire
was just going international to take over former
Spanish colonies in Cuba and Philippine Islands
and Puerto Rico and Pacific islands like Hawaii
Under McKinley who beat Wm. Jennings Bryant
in 1896 and just had an Alaskan mountain that
was once named for him renamed for him again
stripped of its only recently re-applied native
Name as the supreme court’s 6 wing nut injust-
ices first put Donald the Trumpf! on the ballot
instead of on trial for all his efforts to overturn
the twenty-twenty election that had just put “our
Democracy” on the ballot as Donald the Trumpf!
attempted to manipulate ye olde election process
itself first before and then after the actual election
we were all watching in disbelief, yes, even shock
As his followers stormed the the Capitol Building
to prevent the final formal certification of votes
and there we are again looking Dred Scott decis-
ion or Plessy vrs. Ferguson fast followed by the
Lockner Decision saying all of us as them workers
were mere atomized dust in the billows of the wealth
concentrated in the now digital accounts of all those
with more zeros and ones bits than any common
Sense of what the natural world could ever abide
much less provide to a groaning growing engine
of industrial scale destruction of the very fabric
of an endangered ecosphere of resilient life ITSELF.
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.