My heart is too heavy to look anymore.
I'm a Hoosier now, and don't want to remember,
but I still get the pictures.
There was the long walk from Algiers over the bridge
to see my New Orleans gone. The cop committed suicide.
Two guardsmen dropped some Young Turk with three shells
from M16's, bodies wrapped in sheets and tied to the trees,
sharks in the water around the Dome, the heat, the heat
and always the thirst, blankets draped over the dead in a corner.
It's Saigon again. The French Quarter parties,
rich folks always get what they want
and the poor keep paying. Why?
Because they're poor. I have no legs to change it.
I can write but it does no good.
They see nothing but the numbers. The tours
are strictly choreographed, like the fifteen minutes
the televangelists spent walking through the church shelter.
Cameramen pushed children out of the way to get a better shot.
We are on everybody's commercial.
You can't fix all the broken teeth and shattered nerves.
It's there until all of us who remember are dead.
It takes longer than a news cycle for those still breathing stench.
The ninth Ward is in Atlanta now.
Guns aimed at the choppers did no good.
Stealing the DVD player at Wal-Mart didn't help.
Now the Cossacks come to ride us down.
A Zen monk
sits on my floor
eating corn dogs
and drinking vodka
imported all the way
from Owensboro, Kentucky.
He keeps smiling
and bowing his head.
Tomorrow he'll smack me
with a bamboo stick.
Fuck him.
He's getting the cheap stuff.
For Tim
The sheet of paper shot up thirty feet
like a great brown wave crashing a pier.
Your scream was a comet hitting my face.
No more movement of your crushed jaw,
no more rising and falling of your bloody
viscera: It is time for you to fade to nothing.
They sent home the shift and the foreman
is scraping you from the winder. No
madrigal chant for you. No hum of eternity.
Only the groan of the crane lifting the rolls
from the machine sings your midnight hymn.
You'll tie no more flies at lunch or down
a six pack in the parking lot after work.
The tailgate is up forever. Corporate
commands me to get a bottle of whiskey,
gulp it at the motel without answering anything.
How much for your spark or your son's sobbing?
It is now time for the negotiations to commence.
Bret Addison was born in 1955 in a farm town named Rushville, Indiana. He joined the Navy. He lived in Washington state, Montana, Arizona, Ontario, Louisiana, Venezuela, and all over Asia. He was an electrical engineer until about six years ago. Suddenly, he got sick and his legs no longer operated in accordance with specifications. He scooted his walker to New Orleans.
Then Katrina knocked on his door. Like a bitter ex-wife, she took his car, house, and everything else. Finally, a church bus toted him back to Indiana. A year goes by and now he's heading to South Carolina.