Many of the children had chosen (“spontaneously”
the therapist said) to draw houses strange IT SELF:
& many of the houses had multiple windows in the
upper story or roof to show “many rooms so every-
one could have one” though often this black cloud
that issued from the chimney hung over the house
pressing it down while some of these houses were
little more than only a spidery scaffold of lines just
as if they could not reach substance or were trans-
parent collections of lines & still other houses were
fragmented in a collection of parts that won’t fit to-
gether or could never be completed and still others
almost were totally obscured by storms or floods or
were in process of falling down or split in half by the
frame of the picture & too often there was either no
door or no windows or the doors & windows were
opaque so one spidery house contained tables plus
chairs but but there were no people to use them &
when then people appeared they were encased in
the walls or clinging to the outsides & many houses
were not on the ground at all but floating in space
unattached or only attached by lines which pushed
them so very far into distant receding background.

 

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.