Now, as the crisis deepens year by year and all the old issues keep coming up
again and again in ever more virulent incarnations, what was once only conjecture
becomes scientific consensus and the inconceivable is commonplace. And Jack is gone.

But still I stop at Charles St/MGH Station on the Cambridge to Dorchester Red Line
and look across the tracks to see the Charles Street Jail now become the Liberty Hotel.
It’s hard for me still to imagine paying the big bucks to stay in a place that once caged
so much human misery and suffering. I turn to look across the river basin at the CITGO
flashing sign over Kenmore Square where the rock clubs used to be only to remember
that the sign’s recent renovation was paid for by Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela because
Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela now owns CITGO. Down below the elevated station there is
still a corner where there used to be a greasy spoon fast food called Buzzy’s Roast
Beef. Jack Powers my old poetry buddy of Stone Soup used to work there once when in
his many working class jobs he endured a brief stint there even though he was veggie.
But then there was another sandwich shop, the Yellow Submarine Shop, the other way
up Cambridge St. from the old store where jack held court for years in the early 70’s
with his Stone Soup Poetry bookstore and art gallery where I am sure there are still
ghosts down there on the street of poets now long gone, but who maybe were always
long gone but where would we be now without them, without them and, of course
                                                 without Jack
                                       AKA John Margret Powers
                               where would we be without John Margret Powers

 

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.