Traveling for the seventh Heaven
(or is it the very depth of a Hell)
we pass through the security gates
they put up ever higher ever higher
and lower ever lower to the depths
we can feel the tight python clutch
coils of their ever more systematic
over reach into our pockets down
so deep down into our very souls

But amazingly we feel so ever less
safe in our very much vulnerability
this fragile world in this very great
growing universe dissipating away
we are so together in our very selves
feeling we are all so very collective
so one in our explicit individuality
we can see exactly what they all are
doing and exactly who we sure are.

 

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.