My constant ache, my smile with needed poison, you

Who lurked in chosen graveyards with me, to rise from dust into heaven when you held me

My pretty, pale one, dappled, my prey

I cried at your touch even before I loved you, even then vaquero.

Too gentle in your kiss for such a brash and graceless fool

Fool indeed I was. Fool for your careful praise of me, Fool for your occasional violence, Fool for your need, as constant as my ache, to have to have me close to you, yearning in kind.

I could feel it in your fingers, brushing sweetly, vengefully across my scarred body

Vantage point of my addiction

Cooling fastly, rashly with the mad, twirling waters of desire; red, slick and leaping

And repentance,

of penance,

of urgency graceful yet shaken

Flowing relentlessly toward the fall and into the churning pool, love,-

Here at the bottom, love,-

Of solitude for sinners.

It wants and needs and festers and breaks and demands everything.

It has no mind or logic for the peace to create a pleasing balance. It is the one thing I cannot fool or deny. It is my worst enemy, beautiful and hideous, forcing my allegiance as it traps my spirit within it’s realms of want.

But it forces my mind to be alert against danger,humble in my intelligence, quietly listening as I step gingerly through the wilds.It forces me to form a strategy against the other enemies that lurk outside it.

I feel it’s masochistic touch as it strokes me gently while I am strapped to it’s torture devices, unable to save both my dignity and my life.

If I ignore it, it’s protection of the darkest hidden parts of my spirit caves in on itself, revealing my treason against myself, and I start to die. It gives me the sweet wonder of creation beneath my hands, but also the desperation of willing those hands to break things that can never be repaired.

It has it’s own name that I am not allowed to know. It shames me with the evidence of death.

It reels equally away from vunerability and responsibility. It makes me feel stupid.

I must accept all this primal nature if I want to reach the nucleus of pure, unaffected joy that makes me swallow my hatred and bask in the core of light safe inside the chaos that connects my body with my spirit.

I reside in the eye of an awesome storm. Fair weather surrounds me in all of its fantastic forms. I watch transformations of landscapes violent before my eyes from the comfort of my place in the sun, where my peace is never interrupted.

Where I am intelligent beyond my estimation of intelligence, where I am innocent beyond question, where I love in my native tongue. I have suspected this place in my dreams, floating over water.

Wisp of eternity, in the calm.

Holy of holies, where god lets down its hair and eats an embarrassing amount of pie,

Cracks its toes by the fire, one by one

Sings along unintelligibly in a quavering voice to the song of the barely audible choir of angels on the other side of the heavy iron and marble door to the inner sanctum

Smokes as many damned cigarettes as it wants to, burning incense and shooing the evidence up the chimney

It never wanted my sacrifice, my stoning, my moderation

It never asked me to accept anything without an explanation

It has always only transmitted perfect suggestions to my gut

And pleaded with me to go to work and leave it alone.

He is ever the underdog, standing behind the bar in a dark hole-in-the-wall on Decatur Street drinking a whiskey, sarcastically charming, writing poems on bar napkins and throwing them away. This is a man who really knows how to execute that first, telling introductory hug. The man is an excellent hugger. His hugs promise, “I would tear you apart”, and he will, but only if you are the type of dame to stay until the end of his graveyard shift at 8 a.m. to get torn.  At nine, townies that work overnight in the Quarter have just begun to blow the stench off, armed against the tourists with sunglasses from the French Market, two for five, just in time.

He is acquainted with death in a way you must respect. He says he feels like he’s dying every day. On a throwaway couch on the sidewalk in the 9th Ward, sitting with him, the filtered light is kind in the New Orleans evening before the relentless night comes again. He doesn’t seem afraid as he sings, blue in the dying light, and every strangled note and rough, deadpan chorus speaks a truth that dares denying. He is a fatalist, and it is the only thing that keeps him alive.

Against the colors of the Vieux Carré, his primal language removes all customary pretensions from the outside world. The man is fighting demons proactively. There’s nothing he likes better than a fight, and in this place you must find your menacing side quickly to survive.  In this place a person can make a career of patching up the gorgeous faces of bar brawlers who can’t show fear. They are too well aware that the devil is sniffing the air, waiting.

This whole place is a dog fight, protected by a cover of magnolia branches and saxophones, crawling with cockroaches and stunning courage, majic and malice, deep underground. His line of questioning keeps him safe from the danger of the desperation unleashed in the dark streets, disguised as the time of your life.

Many rounds of drinks are bought in a day in accordance with the agreement between those that work the bars and all the characters that show up in the Quarter.  Always present are those that desire a place to go down in a blaze of glory. Then there are the drunken sailors, the artists, the outcasts, the lost causes, and youth hovering between homelessness, death, and catharsis.  In a carnival of vampires and voodoo, Victorian farce, re-enactments of salient battle scenes in full regalia, a gauge of humanity is calibrated. Whatever the news, conflict, issue or occasion, whatever the time of day or circumstances, the first step is to sit down and have a drink (at least).

To live this way for more than a week requires a strong core, a sound constitution, and a willingness to get the baseball bat out from behind the bar as need be. The prevailing governance, behind the masks, is harsh, undisguised reality. Socially unacceptable celebrity identities larger than life preside over the priceless beauty of New Orleans that cannot be described. The cops don’t come until the deciding blood has been shed and is the only evidence that remains of a cry in the wilderness. It has always been this way.

He is rooted to this dynamic, intense and highly autonomous, and is a creature of terrible wonder. You will have to have a certain darkness to admire him. Most people really do not want to know what he knows. This city is only a contradiction in terms to those holding out false expectations of human nature. He is strangely institutionalized within it, this parish of perpetual experiment between criminals, prostitutes and priests. He is a magnificent trinity, tirelessly performing miracle acts of survival, all these years.

He buys rounds, plays craps over the bar, and fucks with abandon against the dawn. At the very least he gets a few good punches in before falling, still cocky, to the barroom floor. Aware or not, one must look to find him. Lying among his crumpled cocktail napkins; sacred writ in black sharpie, a prophet of those who don’t give a damn if they are damned smiles through the blood, and reaches out a hand.

“Sometimes we get darker than we should

Black clouds fade out the perfect sun

And we hang our heads like tired dogs and lick our little wounds

And cry out ‘HOLY!’ to the impossible season

Our teeth painted yellow,

Our eyes rolled back-black,

Waiting for the night.”

~LSA, 1998

I also see in her face that her body has been the front lines of this conquering of hearts, which has been a blessing and curse at it has been for me. There is no way any man or woman could look at her tits and not be impressed in some way, want to touch them, even if they wouldn’t say so. They are very distracting.  And this is right away, like testosterone, before I even know what she’s like.

She is innocent in a world-weary way, as I am innocent, not closed to wonder, even after the cosmos has railed against me, wanting me to believe that avoiding pain is a reason to avoid life, and failed.

I like people complicated, struggling to grow, with much beneath the surface. People with a dark side, people with an animal grace, people I can’t easily interpret into a caricature in my imagination.

I was too tired to be too concerned, but my heart jumped at the prospect of sleeping in the same small bed with her alone in a bedroom filled with story books and mirrors. What happened was I just ate the ramen noodles she gave me and fell asleep, -probably drooled on her pillow. I don’t remember when she left to sleep in some other place I never saw before I stumbled out of town in the morning after breakfast,  smelling like an ashtray and hiding behind my hair.

I only like things where I can transcend the odds. I have to do some wrangling to get the odds stacked just right against myself so I can triumph victoriously over them.

I only like complicated things.

I have delayed negative reactions when my rationalizing fails to pass muster in the real world outside my brain and tricky speech. My body tells my mind once again, “No”. And I feel bone thin and cold and guilty. All in an instant, my gut tells me how I’ve sabotaged myself , and denies knowledge of the person I usually think I am.