Life After the Storm

In the end, when payment was due,
the piper got his in gold-
an array of jewels that sparkled
like fairy-dust on the evening horizon.
I was there, a fair-haired child
with wide curious eyes, milking the scene
for great insights that only fade into vague
recollections of something, somewhere I had once seen.
Life, thereafter, was a proletarian brown fall
that fell to snooze button remedies
of flashing panic - waking when I should've,
could've, would've been awake some time before.

But some time before, I was lost,
though not in the way I am now,
the way that says in crazy dreams
things aren't what they seem.
A listless punch-clock of blurred reality;
an electro-hum thunder glow that resonates
from below and within but then has nowhere
to go until it is too late:
Late as a measure of guilt,
a practice of imposition of one's will
over another until victory prevails
as timeliness and order and then…

Businesses can be established,
militia formed, interest sparked, peaked & maintained-
a steady drum rhythm that makes man
stand upright a little more easy.
Time becomes the measure of the man
and not his soul - the practical, tried and true,
red, white and blue estuarial estate
of everything the pink man says is great.
And that's great and all, but when the wall
comes down, whether at once or brick by brick,
the nature of the man is the one that will stick
in the innermost confines of the observing mind.

What I've observed is that when a ravage howl
cries in the night, it is the civilized man
that cries first in fright, is first in flight
and first to cry Heaven's mercy at blight.
I've been to Point Pleasant in the early
dawn, when the stench of Death was Hell's yawn,
and sat down by the riverside where it's best
to decide from whence the current comes-
the soiled stains of an undergarment numbed
and warm, somber in the sun, while flies
play catch the flesh marmalade
and go away disease-ridden and free.

But there ain't no such thing as free
no more, 'cause everything costs you,
whether it's a dollar or two or more,
so much more than you know,
counting as ledger book expenses
of things in the world that don't
carry value over from one fiscal year
to the next; one physical fear that manifests
itself into ripened peach flowers of joy-
a blood red heart with a seed of pride
and prejudice, because prejudice is a product
of environment, a final end of an emotional struggle.

Struggle doesn't exist without hunger
and hunger is one door that is always open,
always eager to see someone step through,
though they come by the legions
stepping through their rickety buses wreaking
of diesel fumes and cheap cigarettes,
stomachs aching and people pissing alongside
the roadway, chatting about the doom and gloom
of their self-service individualism, a life of pugilism,
and a silent scream let into a pillow at night
and yet there is food aplenty
to share and give away to good friends who will play.

To share and give away is a good way
to play cowboys and Indians when
the Indians are dead, their lifeless corpses
only soul-dust, a spirited mist in the memory.
I've been to Big Horn and felt its pin-prick
ripping through the wilderness, savage screams
yelling war cries, the hallowed ground of expansionism
still moist, for the world measures time by the millennia.
What's a thousand year Reich when democracy expands,
stands tall and decrees "Give me you poor, your tired,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"
but then lays her golden lamp down to darken her door?

On wintry nights, when heat is either
a luxury or a place to meet,
doors are darkened by grim shadows
of what may have been provided,
but the great bread-basket grows fat
on guv'ment subsidy, a corn-fed, white-bred,
all-American welfare state that exclaims
"All is well! All is well!"
when all is hell in the stew pitted dwellings
of the poor, the economic backbone hitting
the door and spending their great masses
on an urban myth of suburban redevelopment.

The city burns and Nero smiles
at the vast, empty lots, the floating
shotgun doubles tethering away in the wind
and the flood (and the flood) that divides us-
The river that divides us is ever-flowing,
ever-growing wide and nonchalant
and that body, so sleek and brown,
now runs through our homes to cleanse our lives
and make us whole again, to give us hope
again, to make our homes again;
but we return in our rubber boots trudging
through waist high, oily muck making the best of it.

In time, for what is time if you see it,
it'll fade, the memory evaporating,
the flood waters receding and crawling
back to the bayous and marsh
leaving behind the one suspicious myth
of cholera or malaria, keeping up the hysteria.
The schools will be closed this semester
until we can find an investor who will
have a will to build on a sill
and hope for the best before heading west
again- west, where the water is still clean,
where the lean can sit idly by and judge.

There is no greater judgment of man
than how he stands when he'd rather cry,
when all around him are the dying
and the dead, the fetted stench bubbling
in heated intestines until, at some point,
they pop and the fizzling acid flows nasty-
a river of abandoned maggots squirming
in the mud, their home and way of life
washing away into the soil and I've judged
them. I've judged maggots because I'm shallow
at times when it matters the least,
proving that I am a beast of city streets.

When the electro-glow disappears, when a million
man city goes powerless, it's famine
or feast for those who have the least
or most and the great divide widens
when the arithmetic is done among the people.
For there are those who multiply their wealth
and those who divide among strangers
what they've got left to share.
I've stood in line now and found
I'm not above charity. I've stood in line
with fine people and found little disparity,
the only polarity the color of our skin.

Underneath it all, we're the same,
conjoined in the pain of the times,
remembering better days through the haze
of disbelief until we can make a trip
for Popeye's and Dixie beer and return to a cheer
and a group of envious, hungry eyes
that despise their own empty hands, the demands
that are natural when times are lean
and people grow mean; their envious, hungry eyes
that want to rise up from the deep
pockets of despair and grasp at fresh air-
a cavalcade of sullen, yet luminous beings.

Beings, nonetheless, endowed with a golden spark
that explodes in time of laughter,
in time of jazz, razzmatazz and merriment,
before the children were sentt away to other schools,
before foreigners to our foods called upon us
like we were a ship of fools living
in a pool of sin. But, in the end,
we'll all meet in Hell and it'll
be swell, a multi-colored Margi Gras,
a purple, green, and gold that is bold
and waving strong like a flag or a small child's arm
in the sad excitement of departure.

Departure is excitement when the music
is good, when the piper's tune is one
to follow, a favorite son going hollow
to a grave at the edge and we all
live near an edge that blends with another
until a brother from one side or the other
calls us over - where over means over
from the other side until we've realized
the lie and gone to the sunset to die,
our feet firmly sinking in the stench and the swamp,
our duck boots left at home, and we go
that last night to our final fais do-do.

2 October 05