Thursday, January 31, 2013

Midnight Sounds in NOLA

Contemplating moving back to New Orleans
The balance between love and fear weighs in me like a scale
The old Greek kind with the counterweights fashioned in court rooms
The houses are called shotguns and my mind pictures firearms 

The decision to purchase or not plays on the newscasts
The safety training courses and permits wrestle with the trust into the streetlights
Rational actions know that fathers with alarm monitoring
Electronic drafts from their bank accounts can compute the minutes
Of deciphering false alarms and home invasions, the futility is thick 

Nightstands with boxes under quick-access combination with a clip of bullets
Insert a cell phone grabbed calling 911 for understaffed NOPD
Budget cuts, taxes, population diaspora and reflux, bars on the windows and doors
Iron fleur de leis gates and un-illuminated signs in the garden district
Of surveillance cameras beamed to the internet  

The fear and the love battle it out like rival gangs of drug dealers of cocaine and religion
Peace and hungry bellies and school systems where the toilet paper is locked up in cabinets
Distributed by the teacher in open acknowledgement that a young man has to shit
And he and his classmates are not trusted to cram the commode with paper
If the rolls were left out in the open, got to have a permit and an enforcer  

The potholes of Lakeview and Gentilly roll and devour all sorts of jacked up rims
Removed in the night like kicked in doors and sporadic pop-fire
The city has a three-day a week paper praying to the Saints for special exceptions
I think about men coming through my backdoor with bad intentions  

The length of time a father hears a noise and thinks of his daughter sleeping
The inevitable scream of her diagnosing the anomaly and her running for daddy
The layout of the shotgun home wrecks about my hippocampus into weighing the reach
Cell phone, hand-cannon or daughter or nothingness or blood or I did not ask for this 

I think of a shadow face and unloading if I can transplant victims into a workable alternative
I think of dead children, choices mothers and fathers make in medical facilities
I have no qualm and I will make a mother or father childless if that is what it takes
Elections are truncated into either or, him or me, love or fear 

To avoid the monsters is not to be an angel and to become part of the monster is not be a devil
The blur of phantasmal roles we allocate among the walking-dead is a spectrum of life
With the lies the sage point out to take out the f for a portion of the truth
So this is what we do to enjoy the parades

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