Funny strange not funny ha, ha (sounds like a Native American princess
(Not Funny Ha HA) how! HOW! The broken system keeps assuming (again)
and again an, oh, too human face so as I’m refurbishing my giant End Optic(s)
Illusion Labyrinth up comes this tiny woman in a huge electric wheel chair and
parks herself in the middle of the lines I have to draw next and under her shock
of black hair I can see she is not waiting there to thank me for my efforts that have
me already covered with sweat under my layered clothes but I simply move on to draw
other lines around her until coming up next her chair I ask what’s bothering her and
she says “you don’t have to pray like that” I guess referring to my labyrinth meditations
physically laid out through whole body action and flowing in chalk through my hand and
unto the asphalt where every ever one can see this is my vision holy wholeness The All One
Thing beyond the all one thing we make of the world to which with justice we bend, we bow
down as I bow down like the Islamic bows of Muslim prayer I think but this woman is somehow
sure I’m doing some satanic pagan of ritual and she scoots off in her electric machine as she
realizes I can just draw around her and fill in the place where she sits when she moves
as eventually she must but she leaves only to return once again with another fellow in an
electric chair and as I’m working he attempts to evangelize me to which I respond that I’m busy
with my practice “please, leave me alone” but he still insists that I come up with a verse
from the bible, of course, and thus pushed I quick re-member this poem I wrote Once Now
about the decline of the Holy Roman Empire and the post-Dark Age rise of the nation states
and rise of our Corporate Cathedrals as the Nation States become petty vassals of the Banks
(Bancs) “soft shuffling $money into credit” and from the depths of me and the ancient wisdom
literature I hear and say “Be Still and Know That I am God” but still he has to add addendum
to the Word of “you must read scripture in context”, yes I thought, “context” context of ex-
nihilo emanation where God always was and ever will be and Creation (s)he It Self comes
from nothing a blinding flash long gone never to be seen again you see right there at the epi-
center of everything which is, of course nothing or as Mom always said “perish the thought”.

 

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.