The Moving man who moves from here to there, ah, yes there where
all the matter becomes all the energy.

How strange to live in an age when the Humanists become the defenders of all life
while those who espouse a “culture of life” see the defense of the biosphere as a put down
of human privilege. Will the great mover be there when we really need her? Will the first
mover ever stop moving long enough to know the real skinny?

The Moving Man can only explore the spiral guts of the cosmic cave.
The Moving Man feels the intestinal fort of our universal predicament in his entrails.
He undulates his snake like spine, takes his hips through the four quarters and extends
the life force to the extremities.

It comes back to him in the everyday, the squirrel sitting up to take a look,
the cats tense form creeping its way toward the last dash of the hunt,
an older man and aging woman playing at the tic-tickle-tica game of adult and infant,
the way that Spring waits in buds on the trees of late winter, the promise
that new life always makes to all that is aging, the manifesto of morning light
that allows us to feel who we are in the birth of our bio-rhythms.

Sleep deprived we are someone else than when rested.
Who is this ranting clown who can’t abide being mocked?
Where is wisdom in the Information Age?
What can be the matter?
Why do we all have to put up with all this?
How can we go on?
When will our questions find answers?

When all the answers are right before us.
The first buds of the new Spring open their hope full mouths to the Moving Man teetering past
hunkered down under the bulk of this huge bag of images and poems thrown over the sore shoulder of weighty care
and a schedule to keep, places to go, places to go. The Moving Man. The Stone Soup Moving Company and the All One Thing.

 

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. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.