Corporeal comics Pilgrim Puritans marching on to the Beautiful City
on a hill from the undercroft of the Nautilus Cathedral where there the
labyrinth spirals into the basement floor as time flies away in finite
          space
plane and solid become a Milky Way of these luminescent
          microorganisms
bacteria that so crave living deep in the innards that they chemically
          signal
to synchronously turn on their light to attract the great fish school to
          eat them
since they do best in the digestive process they attract the predators
          inside whom they thrive…
while here we are doing our walk that goes nowhere in a body that is
          now here
treading on the back of the tiger that says DON’T TREAD ON ME like a
          snake
on the labyrinth floor around and around and again and again go the
          long file
of corporeal comic Pilgrim Puritans black and white in living color sad
          clowns
crazy clowns, simple comic clowns ready to do anything for a laugh and
          silent,
still in order to finally be heard fast as a pop and slow as the snow
          piling up
in a heap no movement cheap each gesture immobile statue labyrinth
          life
                                                LIVING

 

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.