From one of the great poets - an American immigrant and one of my tribe - about the New Orleans disaster
The Iconography of Hell and Our Guilt -
Eleven days into disaster, a poet reports
By Andrei Codrescu
Each day has its own pictures:
bumper to bumper traffic two states long
a frenzied mob in a domed prison
rising water
the hungry pushing carts out of looted stores
rooftops in a lake as vast as the eye can see
dead city silent city
the survivors the tribes
stadiums filled with refugees
helicopters over a dead unlit city
a ragged parade of decadents spitting defiance
television cameras as numerous as marchers
a can of tuna and a strand of beads
take that you former shithead king
dead pets rotting away behind locked doors
the smell of putrefaction visible
muck darkness heat an eviscerated pigeon
two dogs shot by a hired executioner
a sea of horrible stories rising like swamp fever
from the foul mouths of dear ones from exile
11TH DAY OF HELL!
We are all working in this pit of sorrow to unfreeze time.
Time is the universal chauffeur
by Willis Barnstone
Time is the universal chauffeur. Slow
he carts me through space,
but when he dumps me I've no place to go.
He's also the surgeon general
who heals (and in time kills). He heals with hours
and days, his best pill of all--
no ointment or gauze--just his fat face
hovering over me. And he is author
of a novel titled LIFE. I'm crammed in his briefcase,
plotted in chapters till THE END.
A famed dermatologist he moderates the sun.
If I measure him and cream down,
I can always spot the damage he has done.
It's the secret stuff inside
my skinsack that worries me. Yes, machines catch
his photo and footsteps, but I abide
with fear. Once he's gone, I'm not. Often I try
to slow him down as he walks
through me. Slowtrack, I say. This clown is sly,
abstract but relentless like a star,
and goes through his set acts, laughing at me.
Godless, I bless him for his laziness.
Ready for some lighter fare? Happy to oblige -
Shelby the Dog
by Robert Sward
";all that I cared for was the race of dogs, that and nothing else; To whom but [dogs] can one appeal in the wide and empty world?" --Franz Kafka
Philosopher Dog
Shelby:
In a world of No,
dogs are a Yes.
Sixty-eight million dogs in America
and they understand
there is a fundamental human reaction
to everything--,
and it's No, No.
Grrr! Dogs hate hearing shit like that.
People, it's all No and it's No
and it's No.
And they look at a dog sometimes
and the dog is on its back, say,
on someone's lawn,
legs in the air,
rolling and bouncing;
'This is the hand I was dealt. I'm a dog,'
says the dog. 'It's not a problem.'
But people
Look at me, Goddamnit! '
I don't have time for this,' you're thinking.
'Something better is going to come later.'
No, no it won't. As Ram Dass says, This is all there is.
This is all you get.
'All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers,
is contained in the dog.'
Do you know who said that? Kafka.
That's right, Kafka.
Bow wow, bow, wow. Bow, wow.
Bow wow NOW.
P.S. Also, see "Sand and Water" by Beth Nielsen Chapman below
