It turns out it all started with the 12 Days of Christmas the Twelve Lords a Leaping
were really basic belief in the Catholic Apostolic Creed and here we are stuck
together by a desperate unity shattered by Protestant Division, ah, those eleven
piper’s piping, the eleven faithful apostles, yes, whose evangelical gospel has
turned into the only way that is to describe the fatal alliance of prosperity
preaching and High Finance Wall Street Transnational Corporate Bankers.

Never fear you’ve yet to hear the whisper of the feet of the 10 ladies dancing so
sylvan to the sound of the spoken word, Ten Commandments engraved in stone,
scribed tablets, just waiting for American courthouses and their carefully
manicured parks , waiting for the nine drummers drumming and the 9 Angelic
choirs and 8 maids a milking the eight beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount
ringed all about by seven swans a swimming in the sacramental seven seas a ritual
for everything that might happen in just six geese a laying all creation which took
place in just six days a few chapters of the first five books, live, 5 gold rings all
enchained and those 4 gospels calling bird truths of the whole story three in one
three French hens and two turtle dove testaments almost incestuous intertwining
from Holocaust conquering genocidal horde to counter-cultural radical Jeremiads
and studied resistance to empire itself the human sacrifice on the imperial death
tree to save life from its imperial self.

There’s the partridge, the lovely partridge in the lovely resurrected pear tree.
True Love. Gave to me.

 

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. Today marks his one year anniversary as a poet columnist for Oddball Magazine.