Tag Archives: New Orleans

Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez

Beneath the rust and the gray toxic dust
left behind when the water went down
past the edge of the Quarter’s bright lights and disorder
there’s nothing much left to this town

Maybe the Crescent City was never too pretty
for more than three blocks in a row,
but it made our lives fuller, regardless of color,
and now it’s someplace no one else can know.

You may know what it means to miss New Orleans
from a Mardi Gras record or two
but what’s gone’s gone forever; rebuilding will never
bring back Nawlins rhythm or blues.

‘Cause the heart of this city is broken in two
where the levees burst that afternoon;
and the warm welcome mat that asked “Hey, where ya’t?”
won’t be back again any time soon.

All the grand old traditions, corrupt politicians,
the trash tourists leave every year,
they’re all gone, or in trouble, buried in the rubble
that may take a lifetime to clear.

What they bring back will not be
New Orleans, not to me;
the places they’ve saved just are not
more than pretty postcards
of wrought iron and front yards:
ghosts of the town that care forgot.

08 DEC 2005

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No Useful Illusions

What useful illusions we once had are gone:
that governments serve, that the lowliest pawns
with slow forward motion may yet become kings.
How quickly it seems that the simplest things

become complicated and mired in deceit,
and minor successes engulfed by defeat;
despite constant vigil and unending toil,
the fruits of one’s labors will wither and spoil.

And those who claim otherwise, believing luck
to be the foundation of bargains yet struck,
are lost to insanity greater than most:
that we are prized guests of some kind, noble host

who when we plead hunger, will provide the bread.
‘Tis more often shadows of crust, and instead
of a table of succulent dishes and wine,
more often takes form in less pleasant design.

What artifice leads us, in spite of these truths,
to believe in justice beyond tender youth
and strive for no purpose, for unseen reward,
each beyond the true means that they can afford,

to trust in a government built on such things
as man’s dignity and hope’s gossamer wings,
and think that the tightrope we cross at the top
of the tent has a net below for when we drop?

Illusion, illusion. There is little use
in hoping one’s neck out of reach of the noose;
and justice? Like vultures, the lynch mob rides in,
an anonymous mask for a number of sins.

04 DEC 2005

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A Different Sunrise: an alba

What light may break through the scrub trees
that line the well-groomed yard at dawn
is thin and pale, its weight degrees
less than it when it lingers on

the lower depths, the southern end,
below the Orleans waterline;
there it hangs and drips with fat
and heavy water in the pines

and live oaks. Yet it brings the day
on the same time clock. Newton claimed
that mass does not affect the way
a thing responds; its strength is tamed

by gravity, that evens out
the superficial and the deep.
I, though, with Einstein, have my doubts,
while watching as new sunsets creep,

some like a lion, others meek,
with peacock’s plumes, or subtle shades;
some like a corpse, that dares not speak;
a few like boisterous parades.

What insights in an hour’s time
the rare observer gains, are lost
once that same sun completes its climb
and burns away both death, and frost.

14 OCT 2005

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Kali and Shiva

A single shelf sits untouched by the rubble,
its contents unmolested by the storm;
while mold grows from the walls like razor stubble,
and walls and ceilings crumble beyond form.

Below, the room is nothing but destruction,
appliances and desks upturned and smashed,
displaced and wretched by the flood water’s suction,
strewn through the house and turned to worthless trash.

kalishivaaltar.jpg

Along the ceiling molding where it crested,
a gray mud line demarks the surge’s path;
yet that shelf seems pristine, and calm and rested,
quite unaffected by Katrina’s bath.

On that shelf? Kali and Shiva, destroyers,
look out into the chaos of the foyer.

08 OCT 2005

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The Storms We Name: an acrostic

H elpless in the laughing face of elemental change
u nloosed as a pointed reminder that we each exist –
r eally, at the mercy of the Mother’s loving hands, the
r ight extending blessing, while the left removes our veiled
i llusions of reality. When humans pause and
c ontemplate their permanence beyond wild theories
a nd religious dogma it really comes to this:
n othing last forever except
e nergy, which we can only borrow for a while.

K ept too long, without knowledge of its purpose, it
a trophies, or seeks to be released; we see this shift as
t rauma, without sensing the balance that is
r ighted by a ruthlessness that makes our lives seem
i nconsequential, even meaningless, when compared to
n ature’s awesome bent for self-renewal
a nd will for preservation of the whole.

09 OCT 2005

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New Orleans

Dear America:

The day after Katrina passed by New Orleans
and the reporters at the Royal Sonesta Hotel
on Bourbon Street,
in the goddamn sacred French Quarter,
were saying “New Orleans has been spared”
I knew it would come to this.

The day I heard the levees at the river and the lake
had been breeched, leaving New Orleans East
and the Ninth Ward
underwater,
I knew there would a Convention Center horrowshow,
the elderly and infirm,
the HIV-positive
and countless streams of self-medicated
mentally disturbed
wading through miles of toxic shit
and the garbage from under the streets
of the Quarter.

I knew it would become a race issue
for people outside New Orleans.
People who don’t know what it’s like
to live in a mixed white black neighborhood
that is also middle class.

People who aren’t privileged to understand,
just by driving down three blocks on St. Bernard Avenue, say,
that there are only four kinds of people in this world:
rich people,
poor people,
people pretending to be rich
and people pretending not to be poor.

In other words:
the haves,
the have-nots,
and the have-credits.

What good is sending people back to Covington,
to Metairie, to Harahan … to the freaking CBD?

Without the Ninth Ward, without the poverty that
birthed jazz, without those
underprivileged, undereducated, underemployed,
underwater souls
who would care about the City that Care Forgot?

The great boot of Louisiana is now a dirty sock.
With its great expanse of money-making Democratic blue
washed out
and only the tired elastic red left at the top.

I’m tired. And I’ve lost my home.

And Mayor Nagin,
nothing you can do can bring it back.
‘Cause unless it’s exactly the same,
it won’t be New Orleans.

26 SEP 2005

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After the Flood

The things by which we measure our success:
accumulations from long years of toil,
the pride of equity in an address,
and our precious illusions. How soon spoiled,

in just a moment’s passing, are these goods,
respectability’s crush torn away.
All the great faiths instruct us that we should
in times like these find hope and not dismay,

unloosed from the material that binds
our spirits to mere temporality;
and praise the soul that in such trial finds
a hidden good to salve its sanity.

It’s only stuff, I know; and furthermore,
in recent months I’ve despaired that its weight
has been a millstone lain beneath the floor
that’s kept our fate in chains. But as of late,

I wonder: is it better the veneer
on these rough boards of ours has been removed,
and now, left plain and simple, our path clear,
are we left with a simpler truth to prove?

I am no refugee, except to those
who measure by possessions a man’s worth,
and would put beggar’s hearts in rich men’s clothes
expecting gold from toxic, poisoned earth.

I have all that I need: the rest is dross
that over time accumulates again;
What good is sorrow spent on such a loss,
or worry over endless might-have-beens?

21 SEP 2005

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