Rockets red glare over Route 51
between the City of the Angels
and old San Diego on the border
they’re shooting such a big salute

To the Sec. of Defense calls himself
Secretary of War as just thousands
of thousands parade No Kings Day
the so-called president sends out

A video of himself wearing a crown
flying in a jet which his actual bulk
would not fit into to dump his shit
on the people demonstrating below

Protesting his calm impunity as he
unleashes occupations first in D.C.
then in L.A. and then simultaneously
his minions launch missiles on high

Sea to kill small boats thousand miles
from any U.S. shore in extra-judicial
kills like Duarte from the Phillipines
now on trial in the Netherlands Hague

While Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu
and his former war minister both charged
with genocide are again killing the people
in Gaza where common front of our elites

All across ‘west is the best’ nation-states
the leadership in business, in government
and media have clung so desperate to their
neo-colonial narrative to blame murdered

Palestinians as they so stubbornly defend
the mass bombing of civilian women and
children by claiming self-defense we watch
as the whole world is watching all of it now

The livestreamed mass murder and torture
we know exactly who the criminals really are
who so flagrantly, even confidently mock us
at their own ever growing, ballooning peril.

 

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.