For a dozen years I’ve been drawing my chalk labyrinths
on Boston Common and from the very beginning, very
first Botticelli’s Labyrinth to the then soon following of
Mother Earth Labyrinth that I’ve learned to draw in so
many forms: Peace Dove, Spider Web and Woman Dancing
the old dance of the seven veils I guess even really except
people stop and look at the writing in the center which
always for more than twelve years now says the same thing:
                                       END
                                       WAR
                                  be (here) now
And still after all the economic catastrophe of the banker
bailout for their derivative ponzi scheme blowing up the
world financial system and endless neo-conservative war
for now over 35 years they still don’t get it: they’re stand-
ing on the common between St. Paul’s Cathedral Church
and the State House of the historical Commonwealth of
the original “City on a Hill” neoclassical Federalist style
up and down that slope they are at the center (or one of
them) and before our very eyes we see all the veils, and all
shrouds ripped away as the flailing Empire mass bombs
Gaza and Gaza’s only protector Yemen & while supplying
the lost proxy war in Ukraine as it provokes an immigrant
hysteria actually anti-refugee animus at home and ever so
abroad the veils falling, flailing apocalypse of legitimacy
               (and its ever more evident absence).

 

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.