Our Plato’s Cave is our broken social system,
a thousand hands full of reverse image finds
we all go around ducking the poor kidnapped
attention deficit disorder chained to the wall
Of screens & memes & global finance schemes
money laundering, tax evasions and, yes, rings
of human traffickers and streams of digital dung
money money money, honey steaming just every
Where the darkness curdles in the dark depths
of brashy sound of a great hole cosmic chime
that only that I that I Am can even begin to hear
awakened to that ever present division of fear
That no one hears your call when you are called
looking only to see past the superstition and hate
guided only by that slim glimmer that only grows
into a great white light down there in earth womb
A new way of life encountering the emerging truth
which those living so far below will never ever get.
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.