On A Saturday Night Before I Leave My House

Where do you stay?

When all the ticket buyers buying tickets say
I'm gonna go ahead and go. One is more
a destination person. One more like go ahead.
And go. Like say a wheel
or a wing I remember
getting carried away.

The one who does laundry meets the one who does dishes.
Who gets down with your demands,
who's short pennies for wishes.

One with too many choices meets the one who wants more.
Who drains the fuel from jets,
who knows what time is for.

How long do you stay?
One stays away. One stays behind.

I am trying to buy property:
it's a-guy-walks-into-a-house kinda joke.
Some even more real estate,
a jughead believer, I somehow build broke.

With a death grip she comes
down hard with a spike.
Time lived is the sum
of days that I "Like."

HAMMER a way

Shiny rims rolling under such chronic keep-on-truckers:
just jump, get off, or fall.
Drawn back, swing stilted like a stay-at-home sucker
punch potholes in the dry wall.

Where you go won't say where you stay;
I pound the hammer for punching stakes in.
Name a certain place along the way,
live there & wait for leaves to rake in.

That pickaxe you jacked,
I want it back to break ground.
Swing it hard to make place,
call it home, stay in town.

YOU'RE HOME. GET OFF. (for Theo Eliezer, Jac Currie, Aubrey Edwards, Erik Kiesewetter, Katie Darling, & Jamie Chiarello)

I already have everything I want.

Living, now, is for making actual unrelenting joy of circumstances which I have both built and which have been built around me.
I have exaggerated all stereotypes and imagined even more. I, travel agent. Double back time-traveling agent. International travel is not worth the memories. Go home. It takes longer, costs less, and postcards can finally have pictures on both sides. I live the most fierce and turbulent life. A terrible plane ride. I'm on my way to where I can land. Or on my way to when the air might tear my wings off. Either way, I'll dive into a quiet. Kickback like 16-ton, lead eyeballs rolling back into a chicken wire hammock. Have a real hard rest.

I laugh so stupidly while my bicycle goes across town, past midnight, past my home.
I laugh at a world too stupid to know I've been playing marbles with its balls since I was 12.
I get ridiculous. This spectacle of self, diving hard from HA HA OH EM GEE HA HA to golden-studded sunglasses I snivel beneath & sob behind. Original Bawler, bitch. Fake bitch with a mouth full of mad ballers. They're not welling up. I'm swelling up. I come. I come with a soft focus option. Press this button. Not a trick.

I hate playing marbles. I hate life's balls, dropping like lead eyes that roll back inside a chicken wire hammock. I thought you were sexless or hermaphroditic. It's a lie, a smooth plastic mound; no orifice, no mind. You crazy. Tranny on my face while I ride through the dark, everyone will think I love you. Get off.

I love living. I want to live. Just live like an organism. Everyone saying they gonna do this gonna do that gonna do it do it do it to it.

Friends jammed up in internet traffic, I employ you, get off.

I dare you to set your alarm, wake, and spit on your sheets. Put your weight on your feet and make to move out. See if you can carry the weight of being loved by the place around you. Strap an electric collar on your dogged heart and fight the love of anything beyond the city limits.

Crushing. High School Crushing. Crushing like a cemetery dance.

Gravestone carving machines, punch this on a plaque for me: HE GOT OFF HERE.

I'm off to party with folks for the rest of all the years I have left, making friends of all the fish in one net, gutted with the same knife, breaded with the same flour, filleted and fried in the same oil, served up at the same table, smothered in the same sauce. All together consumed. We live this way for you. We have such unreasonable hope. Expectations. When will you come? I love everyone on their way here. I'll help you cut your heart out. I'll walk you to the fryer. Drop it in, and imagine how this ridiculous metaphor works. Home is stuck through with the cross stitch and lace making of good sentiment. I am also sure that Home is a fish fry. I've explained this above. That's why I want your heart in the fryer where my heart has been. Thin tall tongs to hold you under our long boiling oil; we share a fried taste. If you want to love all of us, if you think we should believe you, drop your balls in, let them roll back inside a chicken wire hammock, let them rest.

We wait and watch your plate. You're on your way. I smell it. I've always had that crispy heart-popping scent. Just sit down and drop your heart on the plate. Drop your balls, take the sauce. Drop your hair, drop your legs, it'll fit. I tell you, I invite you, I beg you to just drop your face on the plate and get off. Go home. Where you're special, where everyone wants a taste.

Home Is Where this Part Is

One month has passed since I moved to New Orleans.

Cassie Smith, longtime co-conspirator and fabulous friend, is visiting me.

In my attempt to convince her (and most everyone) that New Orleans is the best place to call home, I have also managed to keep us out until 6:30 am, sweating away in the world's most exotic dive bars, where exhaustion can't find you, as you're held up by the sheets of smoke that stack and rise in every room. Should you need to get from point A to point B, say the bar to the bathroom, or the dance floor to the patio, the rolling and rousing 60's R&B, 70's Funk, or 100 years of Jazz will aid in your crossing.

I've begun managing and training bartenders at a new bar/ restaurant/ venue/ club/ art-space called Eiffel Society. We grow a large percentage of our herbs, vegetables and spices on premise. The cocktail menu is focused on house-made cordials, bitters and infusions, aided by the vision of Alan Walter of Iris. The space was once the restaurant built into the base of the Eiffel Tower. We've only just begun, but the potential and the ambition are there.

I have a reading at NOCCA in October, along with 4 other recently transplanted poets. I am trying to write about the heart in a way that hopefully a few people might understand. The heart as container, carrying blood and baggage, moving it from here to there, lest it sit and drain itself of oxygen and worth. I believe I am failing at this. I am failing at this in the wrong way. Or the heart as computer, to reboot upon freezing, to reboot upon downloading software updates. The heart as de facto icon for all emotion in and all emotion out. Home is where the heart is. Where people move in and move out. Where rent is split. Where walls are painted. Where furniture reluctantly rests on floors, unfixed and impermanent. Where you go when you're tired. Where you leave when you're tired. I want to discuss a kind of structural surgery, the impossibility of fusing together the anatomical heart and the drywall of a home. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. This sickness, where we learn to love what leaves, expending proportionately more energy to love someone whose distance away from us is measured in days passing. Not "days until," but "days since."

This is not despair. This is not tragedy. My first love is living. The heart, before all else, is an advocate of life. Rather, this is grief or mourning. I want to dance blindly and awkwardly, breaking down my inhibitions. I want to accept the unsystematic occurrence of crying that comes as I walk through my apartment door, or when the food is brought to the table, or when fixing the chain on my bike. I want to let it happen. I have so much belief, and I would trade the world that I know for a place to put it.

Old New Orleans

After 3 weeks, New Orleans has begun to register as my home. I've spent most of my time shopping for furniture, painting, and generally decorating my 200 yr old shotgun a few houses in from the Cat's Meow on the corner of St. Peter and Bourbon in the French Quarter.

I frequently ride my bike to Mimi's in the Marigny. On Wednesdays, I listen to the Cash-like sounds of Gal Holiday and The Honky Tonk Revue. On Fridays, it's DJ Matty's Alligator Chomp Chomp Swamp Pop Dance Party. And Mondays, the sweet stomping sounds of Meschiya Lake and The Little Big Horns. Never a dull moment at Mimi's.

Then there's Frenchmen Street, with the likes of The Cottonmouth Kings and the Loose Marbles pounding out hours and hours of jazz at The Spotted Cat and D.B.A.

Having travelled the world and the states extensively as a child and an adult, I can assure you that there is no other U.S. city that feels more like a country unto itself.

Coming here has been and continues to be the best of a bad situation. Save for circumstances beyond my control, there is nowhere else I'd rather be. If your life seems like a little bit of hell, then New Orleans is the closest thing to heaven on earth. Don't think I'm simply star struck in my honeymoon with this city... I am well aware that this is also the city of heat, heartache and hangovers, AKA the blues.

The blues is about how to keep moving, how one foot follows the other, even when your heartbeat slows to a thump a minute. And jazz is about the body dancing rebelliously and spasmodically, even when the mind has somehow escaped the room through 2-ft thick masonry walls.

Highlights:

-Orchestrated a tasting room/ Russian experience for Tales of the Cocktail

-Performed as a panelist for the Tales of the Cocktail seminar, I Hate Vodka, I Love Vodka

-Hosted a housewarming party attended by the local milliner (hatter to all the mimis, fifis and post-debutantes, the city's premier bar man who showed up dressed as a knight, a one-time crust lord and freight train hopper turned bespoke bombshell ukellele virtuoso, a film industry costume designer whose best costumes are in her own closet, the local art world's premier designer who's also the hippest version of a southern gentleman dixie has yet to know, and my new band mate, a Floridian surfer girl turned soulful sardonic southland essayist, non-fictionist, and culinary critic.

-Began playing music again. Wrote several songs. Formed the Yankee Fire Band, starring myself on banjo, Gwendolyn Knapp on guitar, and the General (my drum machine).

-Ordered a hot sausage poboy (dressed + grilled onions and american cheese) from Gene's.

-Ordered far too many late night roast beef poboys from Quartermasters.

-Purchased a custom-made rolling bar from Greg's on Decatur.

-Purchased two old 70's paintings by "Richter" of clowns; they seem to me to be studies of what Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten might look like as sad clowns.

-Read the Confederacy of Dunces.

-Danced my ass off to Johnny Cash covers, the Cottonmouth Kings, the Little Big Horns, and whatever the hell happened to be on the juke up at the Saint.

-Attended White Linen Night, NOLA's annual opening of the art season, where everyone's clad in their whites, and the galleries get hotter than a creole kitchen on a friday night at 9.

-Got on my knees and prayed for everything from a job to salvation in St. Louis Cathedral.

-Began consulting for a new Garden District bar.

-Began talks of working for Bols Genever as a New Orleans rep.

-Purchased and actually enjoyed poems from 3 typewriter wielding street poets.

-Chatted with a stripper for an hour about the details of raising wolf-dogs.

-Saw a man weeping while taking brutal swings at another fellow yelling "I told you so" on Bourbon street.

-Heard Journey playing at The Cat's Meow karaoke bar more times then the band ever played that damn song. You know the song.

-Attended a No Wave house show in the Treme.

-Had a meandering birthday party, starting at Desperado's (the pizza place, not the strip club).

-Found a place that makes the best Egg-In-A-Hole I've ever experienced.

It's the laziest kind of busy I've ever been, and my soul is grateful for it.

Now I turn my attention to poetics and performance. I've a handful of leads regarding the locations of readings and various literary groups. I suspect that I'm about to delve into the rebirth of local lyricism. I'm actually enthused.

Here are some pics of my home: