Pesky scientists have found the missing matter
the 50% of everything that just must be there,
had to exist in this condemned materialism of
another era that we’re now so clearly finished

With all that’s so gross, physical, actually lethal
the word that’s so easily conjoined with military
and, oh yes, industrial and, yes, again complex
very complex indeed and in fact and in all that

Long walk out to the very end of the platform
to encounter our singing self from distant past
receding in rear mirror that shows how quickly
the stagecoach flies by in dusty swirl of wheels

Past our distracted eyes, oh, but don’t look now
at the genocide just watch all the bombs falling
on Teheran and then on not so old Tel Aviv and
Haifa, the once Palestinian port of now oh Israel

So nonchalantly they erect a tent on the Common
and it says Standing with Israel, oh, yes, yes yes
how many of us stand with those ones struggling
with God, Israel, and not with starving Gaza babes

Don’t look at the missing matter right in our face
oh, can’t we still feel it there in an unknown pulse.

 

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.