Smoke Alarms - 20161210

Fiddling ceiling smoke alarm beeping once a minute

Ladder, nine-volt battery exchange, placement, warning sound stops

Four hours later back home, beeping continues

Misfit, power connection failure, no determined solution

Voted Louisiana election, afternoon check Facebook of an atheist buddy of mine returning from Standing Rock

At Oceti Sakowin camp who cleaned port-o-lets, chopped wood, washed dishes

Prepped camp, held a body shield to a pipeline in arctic water cannon to let indigenous people speak

Letting friends know back in Providence, “I’m in R.I.” continuing an anti-capitalist revolution

Past sunset to Blue Oak BBQ in New Orleans talks heading with my poet-friend Paul, late out

Memory failure of conversations humans keep having

Of Nicaragua, Grenada, and Palestine, pigs shipped in Cryovac, slow roasted

Victims of white meat fires, red, all red 

Ordering, crossed-over menu items of what has sold out by nine p.m.

Pork is unavailable.  Chopped beef plate, once every six months

Eating cow and somehow, here, now, the decision has been made

With a compatriot to inhale sauce and meat and sip cup

Of water slipped button on dispenser spritz Coca Cola’s Powerade

To blend yellow in the ice melting discolored form purity

Wooden table, pickle, fork, Brussel sprouts, and animal

Talk Hamas and P.L.O. and Arafat corrupt money-taker lived in Tunisia

Conversations inside a people for a people to support and yet self-criticism

Misunderstood externally of splinters of fundamentalist thought-space exploiting

That corrupted bank account vibrating the memory of climate change

And 125 degree deserts and the Israeli pen of no water access or trade

Intellectual people cut off from the world in that heat and time basting in Zion

Of inside Gaza to Jabalia, to Nuseirat, to Khan Yunis

Of Northern Nazareth east of Haifa north of Jerusalem and walls

Of contemplating the second coming of if

The savior was real, of where said Christ would be reborn; it would be in the Palestinian ghetto

Ice caps melted, temperature homeostasis suitable for humans lost

A child born and blown up by a Jewish bomb or shot at a checkpoint 

To understand he was Palestinian the first time too

To say he was Jewish or Christian and somehow not Palestinian

Or to mix the character up in this duck, duck, goose chase triad of Abrahamic monotheisms

Misses the genetic blood chain of doing a test on any of us

And we get hybrids going back to Africa if you could sip far enough

This man of immaculate embryo, sanctified of spermatozoa focuses on some Portuguese portrait

Blue-eyed acorn to the world to seed Christianity west, laughing at triads to destroy temples

Of Palestinian does not mean Islamic, but what if this sequel it did

Just to fuck with the assumptions of picket fences with barbed wire and bullets  

Drinking more water, get up on-own to fill cup

Eyeing the remaining pickle on my friend’s plate

Heading out towards the Marigny to pick up Peter

A black Honduran from New York getting off-shift at the St. Roc market

The three of us head down Spain street

Park next to a steampunk Madmax-looking motorcycle

Paul says the space in the curve is owned by Solange Knowles

Well-press-suited black Muslims stand by a fifteen-foot tin door

Into the warehouse with D.J. music and shadow

High five to a guy in dreads and hoodie

Behind a corner of two-hundred-year-old brick work

When labor was all done by hands

See a buffet line of beans and rice, bread pudding and a family atmosphere

Solidarity community of day laborers party

Paul got the invite after our trip together to the Palestinian film festival last weekend

From Jesús an organizer, Mexican indigenous weathered face and hands

Shake broken English started after Katrina to stand up for the men and women

Standing outside Home Depot to rebuild a cracked city with callused hands

To safeguard a day’s pay for a day’s work under the exploitation of green card politics

To rebuild walls and roofs from seats in the back of pickup trucks hunkered with no seat belts

To have a voice in sanctuary city, someone to speak in the taken spoonful’s

Electricity run directly from the panel here for stringed lights, music

Candles at tables of humans playing gin, Tamika has a hand full of spades

Thinking of Oakland, no sprinklers, and one tip in the system, sounds in my head

John Lennon was shot thirty-six years ago, this week 12/8/1980 

Working class heroes and something to be

A yellow fist up black lives matter mural on one side the room

Day laborer’s brown body in the sun mural on the other

Bounce rap music cut and a brass brand’s horns blaze through the door

White caps, yellow rims and New Orleans black bodies

Tuba, trumpet, trombone, base and snare drums rolling

A cover of the Soul Rebels Let Your Mind Be Free

Step into the second line dance floor and shake that ass

No thermostat turn up the heat of bodies bend into the blend

Of cold concrete and disheveled rubble zone walls and space to feel the music

Women, men, drinks in some hands grooving comrades

Of what that word means and the fear it strikes in certain people

With heat in homes or air conditioning or iron domes

Head out to St. Claude avenue to the Art Garage next to Siberia

With street lights and a collection of post-Katrina hipsters

Selling homemade art and food shares in a shinier community on a variegated fringe

To the left of the entrance are framed cardboard homeless interstate signs

In a who-would-buy-that art recognition and flipped exploitative spectacle

In the rear a twelve-foot papier-mâché elephant with Sharpie pens

Where people could annotate their broken dreams

Peter and I talk next to the trunk of the African animal

Trump and a timeline ticking of people understanding what is coming

Amnesty International has a table and pictures with letters

Humans can sign to support the freedom of imprisoned activists

Farid al-Atrash, Aser Mohamed, Francisca Ramírez, Leonard Peltier

Big Fredda is playing later and someone signs for Edward Snowden

Head out to a vampire Spitfire bar on Decatur in the Quarter

Closing down tonight, Paul knows a woman and a bartender

Stock supplies dwindling and so it is Evan Williams in a glass

Listening to goth dance beats and pale faces mimicking ghetto booty

Paul contemplates his Uber app for some late-night income

Drives Peter home then me, piss break, fist bump, call it a night three a.m.

Six I hear the smoke alarm battery warning firing off again in the blur

Of zombie body waking to look at the plus and minus signs

Making sure the polarity was correctly placed in this ceiling machine

It was, but I had to use force to slam the white plastic covering shut

To activate the connection to keep the safety sensor from malfunctioning

Because the damn thing just wants to spit out the energy trying to help it