I’m down in the Old Crypt Hall, once again where I used to sit down with the rats
all around on the stage looking down at Botticelli’s Labyrinth the sound of the Red Line
moving on its steel rails would quiver with the curved segments of the design and
sound and sight would make a vision one of the world our eyes cannot hold and
the song of the spheres dancing down the course of time right here where everything
has already been transformed and I realize way too late for me really on Election Day
that the funky old electoral college is really a vestige of slavery days put in place
to guarantee the Federal Government would never threaten the “peculiar” institution
it self and I think again of how in the midst of the movement for African-American
civil rights in high school one year they debated the Electoral College since Kennedy
had barely beaten Nixon in 1960 so the Republican Party now become the Repugnant
Party remembers the Mayor Daly machine in Chicago that put Illinois in the “Democrat”
5th Column I guess you’d say I’m still learning new things, after all these years the F.B.I.
is still carrying on J. Edgar Hoover’s tradition yet everything is changing at the speed
of the ever expanding digital capacity still by some magic law of computer science eating
the whole All One Thing world like Jupiter swallowing his, yes his own Titanic children
before they can even be born and attempting to hold all humanity in his engorged head
until all of us , the spirit of the people is hammering with our new tools pounding on the
skull of the new brain just formed, only now, now truly grown and with this foundation
of multiple millennial years and huge cycles of tottering social experiment and it seems
like we never learned a thing and the lessons are so obvious you know and here we are
all together in the old Crypt Hall finally become the Canon Jean Sproat Hall a wonderful
woman of the ministry for families visiting patients in the hospitals all over the city but
today is Election Day and the election will be decided by Slavery Times institution
Electoral College of state delegates set up to protect the interests of the slave states
and it’s the 21st Century I know because everyone keeps saying so because this can’t be
happening in the 21st Century but it is and oh, when will the Goddess of Wisdom burst
    forth from this tomb of reason, this looking forward and never ever looking back.

 

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.