Like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Karl Marx in the 21st Century
sits at the controls of the rocket ship to nowhere now known as now here
since only the baby boomer oldsters know Karl Marx created Stalin
in the Communist Manifesto already addicted to chain-smoking cigarettes
with the dictatorship of the proletariat ready to take over everything.
Then the Lindworm undulates from the Loch and the fair princesses
line up at the royal bed waiting for the reality show to be ready to go.
Oh, the bodies, bloody bodies we discover shredded morning after morning.
Who (only) knew! Horror could be so banal “Don’t look” they say since
“the Russians did it”. Where are those Vikings when we really need them.
Heave Ho! Heave Ho! Down the surging Volga they go and there never
were so many ice bergs floating South across the Northern crossing.
I can’t help crying “a deal with the devil” at the Puritans and Mammon
(himself) cavorting through the equatorial forests in trans-national mob.
Oh, what an orgy in the night as the world turns without ever a living light.
In that night as that worm, that oceanic worm wakes early to see what he,
yes, he has done and will do and will keep on doing to the delicate creature
that would have been if only the slithering finger had not had to go wherever
it desired and turned all that sacrificial beauty into tawdry rags of flesh.
At the controls Karl Marx looks over his shoulder already well acquainted
with his own demise and smiles at us for he has left behind a slender book
the Origin of Capitalism way out there in the English countryside so quaint
those enormous estates farmed out to the tenants so efficient, so improved
so profit-tized the people come but mostly go, most money for the least work,
the people of, by and for profit, profit that encloses everything, a price on love
that rises as the sea creeps up the land the great Leviathan whose coiled form
is the coast of Earth which speaks to us to demand the blood of those sacrificed
princesses from the teeth of the twisted men and square white leaves of
Das Kapital.
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.