If you have a night in New Orleans

Skip Bourbon Street. Find Frenchmen Street. Tip the bands. Dance.
Mix liquors and expect to suffer for it. Drink water, lots of water.
Hot beignets and coffee will help to ease the pain, whenever you wake up.
The Original Muffaletta at Central Grocery is a fine sandwich indeed.

Motion and distance

Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, and now, Louisiana.


Daughter delivered safely. Both of us better understood and understanding. She starts anew.


Tonight I'm on my own in New Orleans.

Yes

Up in a few hours to drive with my young adult daughter the 1,700 miles to Texas in her small high- mileage Toyota, Starla Ray.


The road.


Yes. 

Why I Don't Clean The House

That letter again, found in a drawer, two pages torn from a pad, a vital organ torn from its housing, too bad we didn't make it to lilac season you said, but we did, and more than once, it's just the road wasn't straight.

The closeness was surreal at times, you said - and I felt it too - but it doesn't last you said, as I'm typing this more than five years later.

Loom

So now the night is longer than the day
I am remembering the last two or three vague winters
during which hibernation was my primary coping skill
letting time elapse, immobilized, I'd like not to repeat
that.

Will You Welcome Children?

Australian dust storms and red skied Indonesia,
   all the parched carcasess of wild horses at the
      baked clay no-water-hole. Talk about a let down.
         We have disappointed you, to say the least. 

Khruangbin

Grim

For the past several years I've been visited frequently by a troubling thought fragment trying to surface. I never allow it to develop very far. It has to do with what happens when climate change has gone past the tipping point, and it becomes clear to all that we've fucked it up beyond repair (humans). It's too late  fully realized.

I see masses of sensitive people - the wrong people - dying in large groups by ritual suicide in an attempt to ease Nature's burden.

I don't know how to dissuade them. I don't have anything better to offer them.

Stay and fight.
Probably yet another war metaphor isn't going to help much though.

Stay and try.
This is trying, they say through earnest tears.

Stay and start fresh. Let's stop a minute and think about what that could mean. 

I Will Love You From Afar

When the cold wind rises
and cuts me, making my eyes run,
and it will not relent, despite my
demonstration of suffering, it is
incapable of mercy, like rising
hurricane waters toward an abandoned
dog left chained to a stake,
I will wonder if you are doing so...

In one take, it's like a little capsule of warmth
dissolving deep in my guts, releasing just enough
love to perceive and to keep me stumbling
forward...

And in the second take, the water lifts me steadily,
I am choking beneath the tightening collar, at the end
of the rigid chain, swimming in a frantic circle, with
those words in my ear - mocking me...

Rest in Peace, Ric Ocasek.

Gig

The moonlight shone upon his high white sneakers,
and I was driving my first shift of an hour and a half.

The city was in the midst of becoming it's new self,
and I was half my grandfather.

The places he showed me are of the city's old self
and no longer here to show anymore.

Boy Harsher

Stranger

Walking across the bridge, over the canal, through crisp Autumn air just in time to see the great yellow moon rise above an unfamiliar part of town, I felt excitement and a hunger to walk the dark shadowy streets all night. 

When I lived here years ago, those same shadows, bridges, mills and canals, depleted me, starved me, tried to kill me.

Now they are romantic,  as though seen through the eyes of a stranger.

In another state, close to the shore

More evidence of Fall
Chilly morning
House temp in the low 50s

Memories arrive during this season
Visiting ghosts
A neat Spartan apartment
Unable to sleep or relax
Your patience with me
The way your body shivered
Soon to make your big move
All alone
Brave, open,  and in motion

Seasonality

Yesterday I went for a walk during an extended dusk ushered in by the far outer bands of what had been Dorian, slayer of the Bahamas.

The air was cool and I noticed the process of yellow, orange, red and brown. The acorns were fatter than two weeks before when I walked this same route through hot green steam. Wild grapes developing, not yet fragrant, I want to transplant them. A sad iconic seasonal scent. Like lilacs in Spring.

Three goats bleated at me from a high platform with what seemed like urgency. Was it the approaching storm? Had their caretaker fallen face down in the grass, dead, while engaged in the daily routine of feeding them? Maybe they were heckling me, but I'll tell you, it seemed like a plea or a warning.

It's good to walk. It's good to see no one while walking.

The changing sky, the changing season, the changing everything we do not perceive.

At home, I felt tempted to revisit the music I used to play for she and I. Not you and I. All third person and past tense now. Let's be reasonable.

That slowness, soft light and shadows, it all happened in my body. Less than ten seconds. I should never go there again.

The yellow jackets have created a hole at least a foot across in my backyard. They are working furiously. What do they know collectively? How deep is that hole?

Scene

In the dream, I am reaching up through bare, thin branches
to touch the hand of a small child held aloft by her mother
who I do not know. The child and I smile at each other, it
feels familiar, but we are strangers, and that becomes clear
to me as we separate in a rain soaked parking lot and I am left
holding an overcoat missing the black chevrons of my lowly
rank on its collar.

Wise

Aphorism found on a hallway blackboard in a psychiatric hospital:

"Live Free Or Eating Disorder"