“Bottoms Up,” they always say except
we’re already keeping our head down
‘cause we don’t want to get hit by the
bottom line again they keep jawing on

Incessant left to right selling points
of paper money and precious metals
made of the record of credit and debt
we keep in the emotional storage bins

Of garages, closets, pantries and cellars
where we put ‘everything we really need’
(and all the things happen out of sight)
dimly aware in liminal light descending

In dusk almost night the time between
time itself way down the deepest bottom
of each day where the answers have been
misunderestimated, solutions never exist:

There must be a system to it someway so
the more we believe the more they deceive
and huddled in our entrenching tool fox-
holes we see only their hovering back side.

 

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.