I draw with chalk with whole body movement
a pool like labyrinth called End Optic Illusion(s)
to play upon the blind spot left on the retina
where optic nerve precludes seeing cells.

Just as comic books tell a whole, complete story
purely with progressing pictures this new design
winks its way from one side of the brain and eye
to the other side of who? is just there waiting:

For an image to emerge so that finally
we see at once the concentric wave lap
of circle and ancient spiral feminine,
snake obscured by dense tropic tangle,

The clear ascending-descending mortal steps
of the living common centers on four quarters
of same radius circles that now define a square
that is not really there but only projected

By our neuron firing adaptations to what?
we have previously encoded looking, looking
always looking not at what is or even what
once was but the future, the always changing future.

 

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.