Back in the day they used to say
swing and flex with Oedipus Rex
but now they don’t even have to drop
their drawers in the Emperor’s new
set of clothes they cavort and dance
so even the child’s voice cannot pierce
their shimmering iridescent bubbles
that nestle with fiendish ingenious
geometric like pre-cut tiles in radiating
labyrinth, the branes of universe growing
multi-verse we see through it allonething
these absurd (if they weren’t so dangerous)
men, men, MENs who can never see
the big picture of those little members
in a world of myriad probabilities in which
crowd size is shroud size and under it all
the tent pole rises as high as a sad sigh
how could they not see how great HE is
even as space time dissolves and disappears
the cumulative erections of 4,ooo tired years.

 

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.