Dogs and Watermelons

     Above the bar hangs a photograph taken by a blind man. Depicted there, a picture of the open road. A lone buggie bumping down a wide dirt path surrounded by vineyards. The man inside is alone with his suitcase. He has nothing but himself, and this view, which is giving itself to him like a beautiful woman — it cannot be owned, kept, or saved for later. His body is a part of the universe, the sky is eating him, he would like to lay in the vineyard naked; sadness and happiness envelope him. He knows these two things are one horrible and beautiful moment that swallow a person, abstract the mind, free you like toes spreading out between cold, fresh earth. He casually considers taking his life. But the sun is high in the sky today. And this is not the day for suicide. It’s a day to contemplate what’s good about people even if you have no evidence that goodness exists. I’m sober staring at this picture, now. But I could kiss the feet of New Orleans. Today I think she loves me. The lazy sun hovers over the sick bayou, moving and breathing its trash all over the white hipsters that bike and run their pitbulls around her. The world has been shitty to you. Natural disasters and planned disasters have torn you to pieces. I feel like that too, today. Do you think we could hold hands and be silent. A man bikes his friend by — he sits on the handlebars and smokes a joint. When he laughs from his belly and they ride off into the fading sun, I know honesty exists somewhere in this selfish world. So I feel the selfishness drain out of me. I repent before a picturesque evening. I feel the pain so deep it disappears. Endorphins. You knew it was like this. The buddhists told you to renounce everything. My hands are empty. Now come here and kiss the thick scars across my chest. Call me beautiful; let me know my female pronouns again. The two spirits in me want to give away everything.

god, let me back uptown

a graveyard adjacent to a children’s school

back-to-back to a field where they kick soccer balls

chase each other in circles

fall on the grass laughing

today i brought the dirt uptown

from the quarter and treme

liquor on my breath from last weekend

though i stopped drinking saturday

i promised her

actually, i promised myself

and hoped she was listening

when 

she chanted

if she chants at all

i pray the universe doesn’t tell her to stop

talking to me

the universe has a big voice,

(cause she’s a big bitch)

thank the goddess for keeping my feet rooted to the earth

for one more day

i’m going to work and live uptown

to feel like i’m something

i’m going to meditate in the graveyards here

to feel anything

what sort of tomb will they put me in?

the cool, slick palaces of marble

with the long engravings

stacked on top of my sons and daughters

adopted from corners of other countries

or will i be slid into the bottom drawer

dry stone, etchings ineligible

like canned foods on the bottom shelf

not good enough to be eye-level

i know

i don’t have a lot to complain for

most of my ramblings are that of a child

but goddamnit i want the top tomb

next to the jesus statue

with the angels kneeling around us

there’s a hierarchy even here

i saw it drive my father crazy

nothing left but his bud light and marlboro reds

his thick hands, calloused

his dark blue veins running blood like rivers

through his deteriorated body

i wanted to say

i’ve never been you’re son more than I am today

it’s selfish to die alone, pop

all you had to do was listen

Mardi Gras in the Year of the Apocalypse

Is there a way to wake up without coffee; a way to find delirious happiness without a crowd, without liquor, food, music, noise, sex, drugs, distractions?

FLASH: You’re at Mardi Gras 2012 in the year of the apocalypse. You have a margarita the size of Manassas in your right hand, a miniature plush toy football in your left, and your neck is weighted down with colorful plastic beads of varying shapes and sizes, some special, some ordinary.

You are drunk, or high, or both, and there are colors, voices, sunlight sifted through wrought iron architecture, brass, boobies, the constant thud of heavy drunk steps, push-carts blasting pop music. You hold your friends hand, she’s gone in the crowd, you find her a block down, you kiss a stranger, you’re lost for one day, one day, one day.

A 62-year old man in a neon vest and tattered tennis shoes picks up the broken beads underneath your feet. His hands like ash, pathetic near your wing-tipped thrifts, new like 1960.

FLASH: You’re at the foot of Mt. Everest, the highest point in the world, her peak shrouded in menacing silver and white condensation. This is the insurmountable object, isn’t it? But haven’t women and men climbed and sat upon the summit, appendages frost-bitten and destined for amputation, lungs void of oxygen?

Jon Krakauer climbed Mt. Everest and witnessed the death of 9 people in order to write an article for Outsider magazine. He simply had to do it, to conquer her had been his boyhood dream. Why climb Mt. Everest, why take so many near-suicidal risks, the climbers were asked? Because it’s there; this was the infamous answer. Krakauer had a wife, kids, a writing job that delivered him up from underneath the poverty line, a home – what he called “something like happiness.”

What makes us just comfortable enough not to try any harder?

Why won’t the record of mediocrity stop scratching across the needle?

FLASH: You’re back at Mardi Gras but the drugs have worn, the music has stopped, the sinners are preparing to repent, the non-religious are giggling about the approach of Lent; witty banter, the mouths of strangers, shitting all over New Orleans like they know her.

And Mr. Neon Vest empties your port-o-potties for you year after year, picks up the beads you didn’t want despite the cheap labor that produced them. How much can you devour in how little time?

How senseless have you become underneath your costume?

What’s really left under there when you take it off?

Should you be able to count on one hand the people that really know you?