Jazz Fest April 24, 2015

This was my today at Jazz Fest.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Jazz Fest April 24, 2015

Only New Orleans is real the rest is done with mirrors

Break of Friday sunrise slender through my grandmother’s guest bedroom window

Crawling across a vacation birth of New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival day one

The count of hours at eight instead of six piercing the parceled sleep to wake homeless

Slipping in past midnight for the fourth time since Monday and Thursday Pelicans

Flying low, Tuesday’s dodgeball victory into the bar lights

Wednesday into spoken word in a group of emerging dare I say friends

Then dancing to the horns and keys of the Slackers opening up St. Claude Avenue like a sky rocket

Yoga every evening the pace of a body longer as the light hits my toes ready

To feel taller emerging to ride my father to our annual day of retreat at the fairgrounds

Replacing the boundaries of Manressa’s silent iteration he still attends and I do not

That this place of horses and horns, drums and dung, sandy track and Mardi Gras Indian

Second lined chances is the church of my faith, my New Orleans calling pilgrimage

I ride to my father’s apartment, pausing to purchase a green umbrella listening to Ooh Poo Pah Do

In my headphones driving out with my elder across that bridge of banks

As high school to college pasts parade in a herd of traffic marching towards City Park

Pacing the walk of memory oaks joining us year after year of here to there

Dolla Watta and the lacquered privilege to discern purchase

Jesus parking lots at thirty bucks a car or trek in past the evening herd’s congestion

We stride to take refuge in the Blues tent recognizing Ernie Vincent from some year before

My father’s wizened eyes attempt determination of a six or five string bass

asking if my pupils can discern the count

Strawberry smoothie, crawfish enchiladas, my pop’s Miller Lite

Forgotten napkin to avoid cheese beard he laments and the universe lofts a breeze

To the shared neighbors we befriend as their paper rectangle floats into his grasp

So kindly exchanged and gratitude confessed

Gambol to the Lagniappe stage cross the mud track where thoroughbreds posture for the betting men

The lotus booms in mantras love and unity blossom from the muck thick in red burst tendrils

Winding a wave my father befriends the row behind us with talks of his Labadieville swamp youth

Introduced to Kirtan he attempts foreign words as I see an ocean of friends I have come to open through yoga

My darling New Orleans dances with the universe rising again

I feel where my heart has been the overcast clouds smiling hope from darkness

Oh na ma shivaya parts the rows into red messages as in transition I am to go off on my own

Into my annual time for the words to find my page or meditation as Jazz Fest never fails to deliver

As my father paces back to sit in the blue tent as I go to be where I need to be

I find familiarity in the echo of propulsion to follow that gentle breeze as my eyes wander the wind’s lift To talk to a new friend, her acquaintance and this yogic juxtaposition

Wondering what is Jazz Fest Bingo and liturgical dance

Fields shift to the Congo rhythms of brass churning nirvana

And Sir Mix a lot ass music into an uptown funk

As conversation side straddles my flow into a notebook pulled from a backpack

Scribing two pages (not these) in stream as my hips and legs keep the beat

Vision in my head and words there like a glacier of water calm in this overcast sun

Clouded to comfort the heat of exposure cool that there is time for seasons to take natural course

Faces in the crowd of I am me and he and she and him and them and you all at once

We are this

Breaking of where the universe will take me from here

And she is there with her compatriot speaking of class works

Waving in an interrogative to my volition to follow or not

I oblige in concert divulging a scene of this time five years ago

At the Gentilly Stage after Mumford and Sons and before the Avett Brothers

A crow on a wire nearing sunset the orb blazing and the epilogue to my novel

Discovered in the crevices of wings flapping lifting that possibility was not poison,

But the beauty of muddy shoes

Walking to a NOCCA tent of younglings practicing the art forms

Elders on the grand stage mimicking and she tells me she matriculated a pair of years

Dancing for a theater major in form of a body tested

I recall my poetry notebooks and how much bad poetry I had to write

Knowing only the mad would seek to be an artist, she says if you can do anything else do it  

Every poet I know cannot be but this bartering with suns and moons to feel a heart just naked

To simply be for but ticks of now gorgeously exposed

As existential gamblers seeing the ruse of social pretense and cracking the shell

To see that luscious yolk drip from lips glistening honey and pepper in the sunlight

Until the moon’s grip scrapes the bravery back down swashing in the gullet of doubt

Until poetry catapults the muse to make the words feel like god is every bit as real

As childhood to adulthood taught him that to be a poet is to be massacred

Eviscerated into marrow thinning to see the symmetry of peering into another human’s eyes

Saying I see you, I hear you, be in this with me, in this poets are born like stardust

Fused from elements of pressured fire launched like photons to illuminate

What should be, but is rarely obvious to those less annihilated in the emotive vice

Frozen mango hits my lips from jazz to Latin rhythms it is time to hug goodbye and rejoin my father

To take me to church in an Irish guitar player from Eden to a foreigner’s god

I lay in the grass and read research for my treatise Amen

I rise and attempt to explain some of what I have been working on to my dad as he nods

Like I am a boy telling stories made up in my youth of dragons and laser swords

Transformed into global economic trends swarming into the volition of basic human fear of death

Psychology and tradition, religion and god dancing in sway and he says

I spend too much time inside my head to which I agree

Let us have a beer and listen to music we can rock out to

Through the sands we walk to the center of the dispersing crowd in the exchanging acts

To the base of a two hundred foot light pole center stage for Wilco and Jeff Tweedy’s twang mantra

Of it could always be worse scribbled on their guitar picks to make you feel happy but not too happy

We meet George the Hyatt bellman from New York for his sixteenth street Jazz Fest

Conversing on the three cities of art in America and he knew which I was going to say

That our cities know tragedy and the friendliness of wanting others to enjoy the adventure

Of a place that embraces fear and he asks me what my college major was

As I tell him and have to explain that the only thing I learned in school was how to learn

The walls never meant a damn thing but this here, me looking in your eyes this is human

This is alive and every single person in this crowd has this in them in unimaginable quantity of beauty of fears and loves choosing which wolf to feed and we are this

George his wife, my father and I rock out to Wilco’s handshake drugs and hummingbird guitar

The announcer warns of impending weather as the gray can only hold out for so long

The lighting sparks across the skyline in terrible crackle into the stage mikes

The crowd cheers the group release of that pit fear that I know that plasma lit sky beam

Could end this all right here in this now and I am choosing the dare of this rock and roll Friday

Fair ground field to mock death each time the reaper’s scythe scrapes the sky

Only indirect laughter can I face this ghastly reality this towering pole next to George and me

Is a Babylon rod capable of tumbling rolling baker’s pin bodies and melting the junction box

Attachments into a fire octopus of wires as the uprooted base flings tragic

The idea flutters above the crowd like a mirror of what being alive means

To be New Orleans past when the levee breaks I heard Ben Harper and Charlie Musslewhite

Play on this Gentilly Stage two years ago to the ten that will be August this summer

That for us there is BK and AK, and we are still here singing red eyed blue

Until the magistrate calls the mike to disperse an early dismissal

My father and I feel the sky breaking rain as lighting whips a premature blackening dusk

Walking past Mystery street back towards the museum of art the rain comes sideways

Soaking shirts until the sun breaks, winds gusting over Bayou St. John for a stored umbrella

Embracing it all that Jazz Fest never fails to deliver