The moon full of itself rides the high tide
and the swirling storm rips up the coast
on a jet stream like a giant check mark.

I’ve cut back to working 3 days a week
but everyone still needs me to be a bank
of America balancing way out on the surf…

I’m misplacing my keys, locking myself out
and watching the train pull away with my bag
still under the seat until finally I lie down…

On the Cathedral floor, this used up human
rag of nothing and so still there until my breath
almost stops and my limbs sink into the wood planks

And I might be one of the old corpses once buried
in the space I’m now in yet somehow something rises
from the remains to walk the circle path to the center.

 

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.