Monday night as I leave the shelter
past the Great Ripper, green beret,
screaming eagle, 101, one hundred
and first, airborne ranger who as I
head out looks up blearily through
puffy eyes hardly able to tell who I am
except by my voice he finally recognizes
only to go off on his old tirade about how
“this is my country, and I fought for it
by God, it belongs to me, don’t anyone
say one word against it,” his voice starts
to rasp and then grow louder & raucous
threatening to wake the other angry souls
asleep on the lobby floor with his vitriol
but then overpowered by his own venom
exhausted by alcohol he collapses back on-
to his foam rubber mat & unconsciousness.
After quick trip cross town on the train from
South Boston to Central Square Cambridge,
I enter T.T. the Bears bar for Monday night
Stone Soup Poetry to discover the Vietnam
Poets in possession of the mike as the feature:
napalm, choppers, booby traps-pungi sticks,
medi-vac flights, door gunners, m-16’s, year
and a day tours, R&R, the Delta, DMZ and the
Central Highlands, tunnel rats, sky pilots and
the nurses, ak-47’s, ambushes, and whomp of
the mortars are bandying around in the joint.

 

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.