For over half a year since we went to Europe
I’ve been warning everyone I meet they must
“watch out because the sun is so intense now”
and then so early this morning I read a piece
on lefty website Counterpunch about how the
outer atmospheric layer is cooling even faster
than the lower layer stratosphere is warmed
causing damage to the ozone layer that allows
more ultraviolet light beams to bombard our
vulnerable bodies and I knew it and faithfully
I was reporting it to anyone who would listen
to me saying, just saying we all know and feel
this uncontrolled change even as whole system
just goes on like nothing is happening, brother
can you imagine that great cold empty border
of space itself as all that solar energy courses
down on our heads I feel it down there at feet
in soft asphalt melting around them a blanket
of CO2 heat beating on me and everything else
and my chalk labyrinth my best contemplative
practice ALL ONE THING globally warmed just as
this outer atmospheric ozone layer World cools.

 

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.