Caught in a Second Line

Caught in a Second Line 

I am a man affixed to the median of traffic

Parading through like fascist elephants

Marching over and nearly crushing with each knee bend

The legs are like spiders enumerated in duplicate  

As if pillars of perpetual motion

Assuring myself that their metatarsals are targeting my cranium

Yet they track to above, below, aside and

I stand staring 

The wrinkled elbows plummeting like fists

Hungry for my decisiveness to remain static

Cross or stumble, statuesque or crumble

The consciousness is murder  

I remember my New Orleans

I see her riding on a pachyderm in the distance

Float sixteen flailing beads at the peasants and politicians

Do I shift to catch or become a hobo? 

Will I get thrown like a beer bottle? gutter flotsam

Statistic to the chicanery of coins and cold drinks

Bars and social clubs, pleasure and poverty

The grand beautiful-ugly blooming right in front of me  

So I stand like a rose bush seeing the fork of black petals

A sprout in ghastly need of pruning back to the stem

To begin again; afraid of the highway of regrowth 

Excited and tepid, admixed in the decrepit notion

That this pale thorn extension rooted in this rural road

Is the truncation in and of itself to subside in a murk

Of the number and flavor of humans I will exert 

This energy, fertilized and pathologically galvanized

Into a mental metal of inscrutable cows and bellows

At pastoral moons in the cult of Dale Earnhardt, Jesus, and Tobey Keith kickass  

or  

Move like Miles Davis

Smoking the heroine of Coltrane to find jazz,

Almost, but not Jellyroll or Marsalis, Rebirth or Fats  

And death comes in a second line of

Alligators, donkeys, shrimp, Catahoula’s crawfishing backwards

Across the neutral ground to hear the sounds of taking me away

Like two coins for the ferryman across Styx to a promised land  

Of what was, was a past life, a memory invented to provide the vision

Of what is life and what is a shadow, of where was bone and where was marrow

Sucked out and hollow to see the substance of men valued

In what cannot be seen standing firm when asked and then finding the

 

Strength of denying complacency its currency 

By finding the strength of motion