The city is still a mess albeit with a police presence
unprecedented in all the decades I’ve been out there
throwing paper airplanes and doing various forms
patterning my own movement in order to give this
appearance of continuing consciousness to regulate
my self in order to keep on keeping on until some-
thing else can happen when it just seems like there’s
new walls surround around everything that so mat-
ters tatters shatters and the ceiling keeps caving in
over us and the old Samson Option has so taken over
from the Hannibal Directive where there is terrible
logic to all this heresy that somehow dread revenge
of those without sight will refresh the 2nd coming
Empire of the Romans salting the fields of Carthage
(now Tunisia) Current Age (modern) everywhere you
look another escalation in those old third world wars
forever going on growing always but still not bursting
forth in full nuclear annihilation so I hear them saying
“Why worry about global warmed world extinctions
when we could all be long gone in one brilliant flash.”

 

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.