What a strange trip on to the stars
so I’m afraid to write anything down
so tremulous at what slightest move-
ment moment might make happen

That tippy minute caught in current
could capsize a long slim broadside
canoe a fate worse than death hovers
there right where you live right stare

Help, help…Help! It’s not specific it
is general, general so nonspecific it
is wandering through snowflakes it is
melting on the warm ground crystal

Crystal clear snowstorm in first week
April and already heat wave out West
and the so-called president is an agent
Orange Head dark cloud covers the land

Threatening invoking provoking climate
chaos and war and wiping away millennial
civilization the irony outweighs us while
the consequences are ever so far heavier

And heavier outweighing those evermore
long gone intentions falling so fragile and
crystal clear from the grey looming clouds
stretching away to so many obscured skies.

 

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.