Three Days

Three Days in August and the sun melted the sky and so did I

Burst into droplets of a squished time frame

The weather dropped like an expired alarm clock

Ringing the tone of the debtor’s knell across skin and tax returns

Filings blurred across state lines, life altered in absolute collusion

Between water-logged suburban nightmares with grandmothers campaigning on rooftops

For a reallocation of governmentally dispersed orbital jetpacks

To fly right out of here with the haste of a buried assured future

Pummeled into the crater below heaped under mangled family wreckage

Of photo albums, roof shingles, and swollen purple appendages

Tied up by shoestrings to stops signs to keep the wake

From blurring the lines for gasoline and stability dribbling certainties

Over the sidewalk mapped out on Poseidon’s concrete

A trident breaching three-headed directions of family, funds and fear

In mangled nets of where to go from here

Fighting for justice from an indiscriminate enemy masked in

Insurance contract armor with molded speckled handshakes

Loneliness howls on like a Catahoula cur wandering

Beyond thunder or superdome scratching for shards of rotten

Freezer-discard under a felled magnolia with white petals floating

In drainage canals like a lotus primed for a harvest of hallucinogenic

Transportation into a Michalopoulos’ haze away from post-K

World into a second line of yesterdays marching on trumpet and snare drum swells

Of this mediocrity never fathoming the hell

Converging electrostatic storm fronts could twister

A city of families swirling down a sewer of mysterious pictures

Of our America out on display of flesh forgotten and human mistakes

Merging on a Friday evening after the fervor of the Ravens pecking the Saints

Many heard the first call to evacuate, some listened, some ignored

Waiting for morning and the call of the storm

Spread out like Armageddon riding the wind

Cramming and jamming a lifetime into truck-beds on highways

Contra-flowing into exile, a diaspora of sideways

Out into Omaha, Houston, and Camp Williams

A trailer, a prayer, and a catapult pulling decision

Flinging brothers from mothers and daughters from waters

Saturday’s gone sliding and Sunday’s done grinding

The coast of the gulf into a maelstrom of munching

Man’s housing crumbs on the Earth like crackers and fried chicken

Wood beams like toothpicks and roof shingles like napkins

To scrape the Chevrolets out her gum-lines and wipe the oil slick off her cheeks

Gulfport’s gone missing and Long Beach is long gone and

Sunday night has grown far too dark, but the City of New Orleans is still humming along

Despite the sway, the levees they stayed and in came Monday morning

A crack severed the bane of thousands of stranded in an out of the ring

Man’s failed attempts could not hold back this mosquito’s sting

And swell-up she did like a witch’s cauldron’s crab boil

The sheetrock, the groceries, and wedding albums started to spoil

Mixed in the dirty water the trees they all died

As Lakeview was renamed Oceanside

Complete with a garbage mountain five stories high

The helicopters plunked concrete back in the hole

As man tied to pump out the waters without extracting the soul

My city she lived in a million hearts

Dispersed on a cut close line in ten million parts,

Puzzles of pieces mildewed on a table

How will we reconnect a distorted face? How are we able?

To see a new future, to feel a fresh Brees

Without twinge of fear to take it with ease

That life could rebuild, with out recurrence

Of Kiltz-ing and Clorox and hammer to nail

What if the winds re-blast the sails?

What if my heart can’t make this bail

Again to expunge out the water and wait out the flood

What if my family just wants to run?

Abandon my home, my neighbors and friends

What if Dorothy has no place to come home again?

Living a lie out there in Texas

Our Lady of Prompt Succor please protect us

I pray to you now alone and a part

That reason can crawl out from under this wreckage

To shoot like a bean sprout with tendrils bearing a message

Of charity of man and trust in the stance

That the audacity of hope may map out a plan

To see human beings raw and exposed

Flaws and strengths in scars juxtaposed

White unto black and night into day

Comrade po-boys united for a collective innocent’s debt to pay

No body meant this or did this to us, but we are the owners of a heart and a love

Beaten and bruised barely conscious flopped on the ground

Gurgling the rising waters hearing the sound

Of Mahalia like a beacon marching the saints into heaven

But we have work to do before we can join them and share in

The joys of re-joining that holy choir

Now is the time to replant the flowers