I sense you in a
quintet of detection
I am from New
Orleans where fear swims divergent
From most
American cities;
In America fear
is tangent to its true form
Fear of famine,
homelessness, death, or absolute solitude
Are phantom
mirrors most of the United States
Sees only in
sheen; we call this mirage the safety net
Taxpayer programs
averting monsters like Hercules
Of stomach acids
bulging a child’s belly
Of aqueduct
denizens playing toss with discarded hand grenades
Of bodies washed
to pirate tides or mass graves
Of a soul
wandering on a dust road alone
To a desert, to a
swamp, to an urban slum-pit of bullets and barrels
America has the
glory of democracy, of faith, of God on our money
In the Crescent
City we hold murder roulette in the dreams stashed under our pillows
Nightly that we
read in what is left of the Times Picayune in the morning
Our friends, our
parade crew, our family was not chosen for death’s stinger
As we continue to
spray bullets like beads and our police fend off federal indictments
Our nepotistic
dollars furnish redundant boards of Pharisees tipping tables
The river
shimmies in her banks like a sexpot crimped
We bathed in
Katrina’s backwash; we inoculated from the Macondo’s flush
Priorities clung
to the skin when our accoutrements befriended mold spores
And our
crustaceans grew hydrocarbon-cancers blackening their lungs
We were poor to
begin with in the Christian sort of way
That is supposed to get you to front of
the line in heaven;
So we are always singing about Saints
The perimeter of
the city is maddening;
Ignatius said
that is where the true wasteland begins
The war machines
are aroused like bee hives abandoning honey production
To assassinate a
rogue team of wasps who dared to burst a single entry point
The chasm
repaired; the comb is left rotting from the abandoning workers
Disobeying
pheromones, drunk on the fear of when do we know if we are safe again?
The medicine is
frightened to fund preventative tests
For diseases we might only have in
molecular possibility and we do what we know
We drop the
nuclear bomb; fallout to our endocrine, digestive, respiratory, reproductive,
But we got that
son of a bitch
Would that cast
of cells have developed into terrorists?
Sinking our
prostate, our breast, our lymph nodes into casualties
The peaceful
beauty of ignorance compared to contemplative mathematical reaction
To analyze, to
compute, to ration the data, that leaves a speck of unknown
Fear is a random
variable, a rogue isotope, a flipping coin, a casino mogul’s lovechild
Always lurking to
offer a deal, a contract like a Faustian bargain scripted across political
lines,
To bond us all into a collective hive mind; if we fear it, we must
defend ourselves
We have what we
need, if we would only put the gun down
Please sir, point
the barrel at the floor, the wall, dislodge, and disengage
I saw Somalia
whimpering at our haughty imitation of a problem
I saw Pakistan
sweating off our old airbase of operations
for the Brits
instead of remaining with India
I saw Russia
playing nice with China and Kansas getting jealous
I saw Iran’s
supreme leader dictating from a prayer mat
I saw Israel
twitching a finger on a button we paid for
I saw an
interception on Monday Night Football, called a touchdown
In a distorted
reception and a nation go into outrage at the scab official
“Call it fair,
Call it correct, Can’t you see, It is a plain picture”
No the man can
not see
New Orleans
sleeps with dreamers in beds of bourbon
With beer-bottle
conference calls where we put the headlines of the world
Across our tables
as a placemat for our crawfish boils
Rather laugh
together than look, pretending this water-bowl is Valhalla
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