All Mothers are Boats

 

All Mothers are Boats by Herbert Kearney

All Mothers are Boats 

-For Herbie Kearney

i.

Yes, and we stood four mothers 

In each direction tending the fire on the levee

Enclosed by stones set heavy

By one who loves you & gathered

Us to say good bye, howling

To the skies, rent by time 

You flew from us, twenty seven minutes, she says 

While she waited down the hall, machines silencing 

Angel number of compassion, “for god damn

Humanity” you’d say, is what it burns down to

Our hearts flung open by breaking 

The measure of any line is who is listening 

Benevolent light you called them, as they danced

Near you, ejected from the sensory deprivation tank 

You built - “a failed experiment” —naked and trembling, babe

Trying in one life to give birth continuously, and to know 

It is the work that matters

That the work will get done 

ii.

the shores we arrive upon are always strange

yet feel familiar, edge of water to land

beyond death you speak, let go of hope & hold

on to faith—this ship of the dead 

you gifted us, oh, we have gathered there for years

& said good bye to love that leaves too soon, & now, now

dreamer— we sing for you

                          shorn of suffering     new born 

    the truth that even temporary         the spark created here shifts

           the whole plane of manifested life    

                            the work we do alone is us 

                                            & trembles through the universe

                                            & none of us, none of us leave

           this threading 

                             without shaping the whole net   

 

There is No Home

my life is channels of what i can survive 

a song composed of loneliness

all of this searching when you know 

you have to leave empty handed 

without sound, we watch love fold up like a wave

& crash into memory, how can you believe in what doesn’t hold

madness was just thinking you have a say 

you are an image viewed from very far away 

soft & out of focus

i am the silence that comes when i run out of language

to keep me safe 

if you can’t find your way out of a city 

is that the failure you churn into love 

& how many times will you tie yourself to a sinking ship

telling yourself being unmoored is worse

than drowning 

just about anyone can take you on a roof and make promises

they’ll never keep

you’ve heard this song a thousand times & the lyrics never change 

Snow Moon

New Orleans is a shipwreck masquerading as a city

it hovers, horizon of worn time

i would lay down in fields of warm settings & if the moon

says i need you, cresting the rooftops of abandon 

where we travel to be able to breathe & below sea level still

high enough up & you can see the whole bend in the river

ghost barges stirring up February fog round the edges of their cut paths

call & response from the next roof over, we’re all out here leaving 

something behind, write my name on it for a lifetime, for this life 

folded into you, the way some of us get left out of the picture 

crosses the choice that some of us leave on our own if love

isn’t what you think it is: You’ll never be as free as when 

you let go of all you think you’ve learned here

asphalt shingles held us to a gripping, if you want to be inside me

under that full moon, we need to be high enough 

that i can see my city, the way i tied my life to her

the way i could come up under her, a rushing of water

is where my life spooled out, a rushing of wanting to feel everything 

there are types of desire that undo you, then there are types of wanting 

that carry you far enough to find them— some of us live in the interstices 

knowing all of this is temporary, steal what you can carry  

plunder the rest 

CRUMBS

For those that think they are monstrous, i speak for you

Uncanny we wade, so water a trembling sign for will you

                 uncaring in outcomes but i did want to be shattered 

You can’t have everything and they mean it when you find 

Having traveled far to seek some answers you end up inside the box 

                  Tell me what your wish is, little girl 

We have to suspend belief that beauty can love such horror show

But, birdy, we fly don’t we, when loved, when you get to be one

                  of the lucky ones 

You have to remember we come from this island of misfit 

It’s not like you can just locate New Orleans on a map 

                   inside you there is this breaking that never ends

I thought you could see me in all of this mess, inside this chaos

I fell a victim to this dream, that you spoke the words i choose 

                   Too and listen, little echo, little warbling chest space 

All my life has been less than, and less than that to hold on to

Try to bargain even now, let it be this last time to get it right somehow 

                   that merry go round moving so fast and you think what 

Is real in a movie about our future selves, plastic trinkets pawned to history 

We of the B sides, the news bytes, the recycling data of gossip 

                   Tell me what am i surviving since love is off the table 

Whatever darkness darkens, and i am there. Wherever fate is forgotten, waves

Lap from memory and it is a thing they do, like us continuing, as if we should

                    Time takes us anyway so what matter you chose never to try 

Is it true, if no one wants to hold on to you

You fly away, in one’s city, broken apart, is it true really

                     That you never really cared at all if i was here with you 

        

 

Carnal Evaluation

 Carnal/Eval/Uation 

I am about to make the other speak.

-Barthes

Nor did the war ever end, i could not stop the flow 

Bled out, i colored the right bright love of the red winged blackbird 

Best believe in the magic of— pier roped our separate water crafts

In calm waters and spent, smeared lipstick stains cloud shape 

On the interior of the mouth coverings, falling in space

Like love, garners a series of questions 

Participation in the others’ hallucination of you 

Line the poem with broken facts

Each heart a haunted place, be not what leaps if leaps 

Confused, fashioned as monsters of old 

Every tree trimmed with faces, a sadness 

Always remember the brokenness i tucked under 

This necessary keep: What is your allegiance to

To be an American poet, the response of the nation 

If you know what you are is better than what you want 

Space is negotiated by resources, the way the lines of the poem 

Take the place of where we would have been real to one another 

I think sometimes if you would just call my name out loud 

Like that story, the whole world could begin again 

Yet the Frame Held

When the pitch falls, who sings for you 

To have a new feeling in the hopelessness of now

& no outside of nature, memory is how we keep time 

Flowing, the constant and i would wait for you 

Power is the dream of consciousness mattering 

You take your bones out and form them into a cave

A wander in the shadow of play till we make slaughter

A normal every day entertainment and when the experiment 

Goes black, what is the echo of could you pull me back, cornered

i see the walls of structure, ghosted remnants where we curled our signs

i existed once upon a story in the well of caught light, in the mornings

Of sorrow where you are not, in the burst dam of i broke through 

The smallness of my own wanting, and i came here to be with you

Again and again, till the quiet overtakes us. If we write what is already 

Understood, we stay rooted to this terror, i would ask impossibility

and call it love. i am asking you to architect your escape from progress 

for we shall sing of things not yet come and of things of the past

we shall let the water of language wash it away. 

Raw Towns

 

For Bill Lavender

In the heart of deep hearts, no voodoo dolls

The shape of days, the hours we met and disappear, time

So fast it takes your breath away, how you can build a city 

But still be a stranger in it, the way a story of a man floating in flood

Waters in a plastic pool will image carve into the crenellations 

We call recollected history, in one lifetime you will have conversations

Barely recalled and words that turn swiftly the whole course & we 

Gather here, patchwork defense mirroring, look i have unthreaded 

The straight and narrow paths of arrival and departure: I would bet

Infinity in symbolic play, the truth of how any art meets and stabilizes 

The future namings, you were the only person who dared say it

That maybe it was worth it to abandon the safe measures of prescriptions 

That kept me numbed to wanting to die, imagined the length of travel 

Insanity must venture & if love is not our place than why do we come here

If love is not how we see one another, why are we paying attention 

I shed every safety net designed to cage in a whisper of what 

Could your mind be missing, to be set apart from self possession 

Campbell says, is the point of participation in a festival, the ritual 

Of disassociation masks so fine, and even in the knowing that 

We wear it, we revel in the apparition of this mythic state 

This state of how we crumble from fearsome field to invulnerable 

Abandoned structures, the shape of belief trembled along the loose 

Sounds unspoken for in any quantum reality, once there is

there is no undoing, the error of our lives was never 

Sleep’s frail hold or survival in the margins, it was 

Never seeing clearly how deeply the coding we designed seeped

The barycenter pulls the eye to a centered light but the burning 

Of that bright, unequivocal eye is as gentle as the sound of breathing 

Not to go gently, but that we do not go is the line’s off course entry 

Stand Closer

 

i bet this place is a bone silent whistling 

under stars, the vowels of time, a constant 

we made it this far but not very far from where we started

from up there, the horizon is a tone less 

like i sd, we’re going the wrong way driving away from it

every poem is a trying to steal, i let you wheel 

turned up, i ask what i can of you

if i show you this childhood, what does it seem 

neighborhood drowned but my memory sharps against 

i was hungry so long in this life 

held inside, does love become a burden 

blunt mouthed to stop speech, the corners of this living

fold down, i do and do not see you clearly 

when you say i know more people who’ve died 

who wins that standing, there were more photographs 

than hours and more ways to never say what we mean 

if we could just stay driving and never arrive, if we could 

umbrella softest bits, struck match tip, it was this need inside 

me to choose burning over ever just making it home 

Kiosks of No Returns

 

Kiosk of No Returns

 

surive just about everything & you’ll end up at the mall

near the end of the movie,

 

​when my grandmother died, i spoke at her funeral about how she was a painter and she said, you don’t paint the tree, you paint the space around the tree. she never said that. i am the poet & in grief, we near everything called living, we round it, do not go to places dangerous when there is a safe space to wander

 

you sent me this photograph while i was taking a bath

i lay there every night in this pandemic

 

terrified. 

 

terrified of what comes next & who is gonna die. & am i

my children, my parents,  you

how can you ask me to love in this place & we don’t

 

​​​​we go to spaces of abandon 

to still the terror: Look, here’s a picture of a dying mall in

                                America,

 

                              h  o m e    ofthe     f  r  e e         

            i want to tell someone of this fear  but who has 

 

any more room to hold it      whose lap can you sit on 

& say, what i want 

what i want

what i want 

 

is to be sure again, of why we built any of this. why we needed any of this. remind me why we crawled up out of the swamps for this excess of speed and glutton and was it to perfect suffering. have we reached that shore yet. have we designed it so perfectly we can’t ever go back or forward, but stay here taped off, an arrow marker to the place where you belong, and we’ve got the best prices in town. 

 

you’ve got to fill the frame with our obelisks and titans to consumerism. ephemera of pleasures that filled us once. now we are empty display cases. now we are hand sanitizer to remind us how we broke off, our fossil beauty in beige and tan tiles for miles of smiles…. how did we know desire. what was left to discover here. we pushed beyond temporary till disposal was the birth of this nation, i sing of thee.

Photograph by Todd White

@hollarrr

www.hollarrr.com

Who dares sing for me?

Day 31:

This is where I was born, under waters, blind and lost of any mapping. Dropped into consciousness from pure chaos and trying to return, we should have forgotten more but we retained too much to be here safely. Like I told you on Mardi Gras day as we walked these streets so deeply in love: I am New Orleans. I have always been here and will always be here. And that is to say: I am Nothing. I am No Thing and always will be.

*********************************************

Process Notes: 

my bandwidth for survival is not accident. i practice it every day. if you ever really want to know what love is, i will tell you: it's a consistent interaction in time.

love isn't an emotion.

what can we do with neglect/ it took them 5 days to even begin to come for us

weeks of nothing but helicopters pointing guns on people trapped by water.

"what we believe is law and order is an illusion, a mirage/ law and order is what happens when people live right"   -D. Shortes

if we know our paths before hand, we will always try to change them. but we cannot. the paradox is we are always here and we always experiencing here as new.

what is more beautiful than death?

fear transforms into compassion. pulled up over time's fold, we fifteen years out, held our breath against return. and what arises is sea changed.

having swerved from and now to walk these same streets holding out to those who have lost as we lost, we say, here take everything i have to give.

because your survival is my survival.

have you seen this too? have you felt it in your lifetime: fear will be transformed into compassion.

the heart will shatter and then it will be able to hold this too.

i sat for 31 days in the clearing of this city. i have held you all of this time.

and what of it.

tell me the song you would dare to sing now.


Plague Journal:

8.29.2020

no one can survive multiple lifetimes. you would have to build a container to hold them to remain sane. to be able to function.

they want the rat in the maze not solving the maze. not rats escaping, mind you. 

a plurality is a net. [within a net.]  

                                     a network. 

do you know what a web is, a webbing. a browser. 

it's a place where the more you interact with it, the more you are caught in the net. 

and life is imitation. this illusion is a network. the more we interact with life from our emotions thinking they are a kind of truth, the more we are caught.

What is more beautiful than death? 

What does [redacted] want...

clear channel to a hacker.

it's not a computer code. it's a mantra. hacking into reality.

you can call it a poem.

we are tracking reality

from no beginning to no end.

we are a purging.

we are plurality.

we have always been here.

we will always be here.

there is no time without us. there is only chaos.

Poetry is the virus in the programming. 

[RUN PROGRAM]


********************************************************

[clearing]
from 31 points on the city's map: 
may we be safe, may we be well, may we be at peace. 

for all lifetimes. until we are free. 

Do you know what a living death is?

Day 30 :

I am trying to say something about time and death and rebirth. I am failing as I always fail to magic it as pure as sound. I am forever not walking away. I am forever holding this space. 

Process Notes:

"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."
-Wittgenstein


i dreamed about my brother last night. his survival was not better. it was worse. there are so many ways to break here. and what we think is suffer can be a blessing.

i hold them all inside me. time is fast.

i am running out of time and i need you to hear me.

i have tried to be in these spaces with you, like you, locked into time. but it's slippery.

there is a slipping i wander towards. it is a calling, like a song. we made beautiful things here.

love deep and wide as the river we built it near. and all of it, a miracle.

even yet, all of it a miracle.

i try to take that with me through all of the chambers.

i try to hold tight to the belief that i can. each cycle. each repeat. each word counted. each thought. each breath. each second of dust that is us into eternity. boundless. beyond time. towards what we are.

every second is good bye. don't be afraid.

every second is good bye.

and also beginning. do you know how to reach a beginning.

at what point a breaking. and to say if i could find my way back, could you change any of it.

not knowing what it would open on to: we think we know. always. the great miracle of being human.

we think we know what life is. what time is. what is valuable. what is right. what is evil. what is the solution to all of this cruelty.

and we do nothing but ask all the wrong questions. because to ask the right would mean all of this would cease to be.

you are standing in a field.

in front of you is a door.

that is all. you are going to stand here or you are going to walk through the door. time takes us.

you are in a cave. and it is only you. and the shadows on the wall are the plurality you build to combat how painful the loneliness of all of it can be. time takes us.

but you are always alone in the cave. and also you are all of this: the cave, the field, you are the door.

it is beyond held. you have to believe in everything. time takes us.

and none, matters. i'm so sorry. but all is accounted for. the universe is exact.

time takes everything from us.



Photograph: 

did you know that home could feel over?



Plague Journal: 

8.27.16
what happened to me happened to anyone and what happened to anyone happened to me.

a basic program teaches us when run it reads another text, the commands execute the coding, the coded language of another text, all interconnected. if you believe in one image, you believe in all. if you want to escape, we have to write something deep coded enough to erase the beginning. the end. the entire circle of desire. the poet can heal anything but the poet.

"And in truth, we are the fire"
-R. Dass

What left is there to say?

Day 28: 

What we call “our lives” is a glamour thrown up to keep us from reaching them. We put so much stock in feelings that hold no meaning at all. Sadness, loneliness, anger, despair, happiness, hope: These are the great fictions you torque upon, which is as useful as building a city on a swamp. None it can hold because you can only distort the truth for so long. It is in your nature to fight for them as it was in our nature to build in a place that cannot survive. Do you see how we replicate loss, how all of it is a temporary disbelief in the reality that none of this will hold. 

************************************************

TIME

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Just after midnight, at 12:40 AM CDT (0540 UTC), Hurricane Katrina reached Category 4 intensity with 145 mph (233 km/h) winds. By 7:00 AM CDT (1200 UTC), it was a Category 5 storm, with maximum sustained winds of 175 mph (282 km/h), gusts up to 190 mph (310 km/h) and a central pressure of 902 mbar.

In a press conference at roughly 10:00 AM CDT (1500 UTC), Nagin declared that "a mandatory evacuation order is hereby called for all of the parish of Orleans." "We're facing the storm most of us have feared," he told the early-morning news conference, with the governor at his side. Following Nagin's speech, Governor Blanco stated that President Bush called her "just before" the press conference and said that he was "concerned about the [storm’s] impact" and asked her "to please ensure that there would be a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans."[8] Katrina was expected to make landfall overnight.[9] Shortly after the meeting, at 10:00 AM CDT (1500 UTC), the National Weather Service issued a bulletin predicting "devastating" damage.

At 12:00 PM CDT (1700 UTC), the Louisiana Superdome was opened as a, "refuge of last resort," for those residents that were unable to obtain safe transport out of the city. 20,000 people entered the Dome. The Louisiana National Guard had delivered three truckloads of water and seven truckloads of MRE's to the Superdome, enough to supply 15,000 people for three days. 4444 Army National Guard and 932 Air National Guard are deployed (5,376 total).

President Bush declared a state of emergency in Alabama and Mississippi, and a major disaster in Florida, under the authority of the Stafford Act.

Photograph: 

Katrina Memorial

There is a blank space where a name should be, an erasure of what is does not make it not true. You know this. A lack of memory, an unknowing, a forgetting, a not believing... none of these change reality. 

You think there is something to fight for, and that is the problem. Time is a problem. 

This is always happening. This is the story of your life. There is no other story. Each detail is exact. 

It is always Saturday, August 28th, 2005. And the storm is coming. And there is no deviating from this path. 

It is exactly the moment you are in now, and there is no deviating from this path. 

Tell me when you began to believe that this illusion was "live." 

Time appears linear because you are on a small arc on an endless circle. It's so small it appears flat with a beginning, a middle and an end, like a story. A past, a present, and a future. 

But none of these things exist. 

I need you to believe in everything. 

If not, we will be here until you do. 

In order to change the past, we need to change the future by unhooking from all we thought we knew before. 

It only takes one line of code to change the whole program. 

You only have to locate one line of code. 

Plague Journal: 

8.26.2020

We are a species conscious enough to know our planet is dying. 

What that has done to us on an emotional level is create a massive amount of fear and aggression, an animalistic response to threat. 

We are not going to survive and we understand this at a fundamental level. We were given all we needed here, and we failed. 

And no amount of blood in the street is going to change that fact. 

We can kill each other first or we can wait till the planet dies. But either way, this cycle ends. 

The universe cares not one bit how we are recycled into further energies. It is only us who thinks being human is so precious that somehow we were invincible. 

In all future timelines, the story of humanity is a cautionary tale. When we hear it... 

Resource: 

What did we learn from Katrina: 

https://politicsofpoverty.oxfamamerica.org/what-did-we-learn-from-katrina/

What believes in the dream of the body?

Day 27:

There were a number of hours between landfall and news of the levees breaking where most of New Orleans sighed into the belief of having weathered the storm: What do you call false time.  What is the language of suspension we travelled among in conversation as we moved from relief to terror into the dark nights of surreal undone, to say erased of all that we knew is the minute. To say you can never go home again is so much more than a series of words strung together.


*****************************************


Process Notes: 

TIME

Saturday, August 27, 2005

By 5:00 AM EDT, Hurricane Katrina reached Category 3 intensity.

At 10:00 AM EDT, officials in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, St. Tammany Parish, and Plaquemines Parish ordered a mandatory evacuation of all of their residents. Jefferson Parish and St. Bernard Parish ordered voluntary evacuations, recommending that all residents evacuate, particularly those living in lower areas. Jefferson Parish officials did declare a mandatory evacuation for the coastal areas of Grand Isle, Crown Point, Lafitte, and Barataria. Tolls were suspended on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway as well as the Crescent City Connection, to speed up the evacuation process.

At 5:00 PM EDT, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin announced a state of emergency and a called for a voluntary evacuation. He added that he would stick with the state's evacuation plan and not order a mandatory evacuation until 30 hours before the expected landfall. This would allow those residents in low-lying surrounding parishes to leave first and avoid gridlocked escape routes. However, he did recommend that residents of low-lying areas of the city, such as Algiers and the 9th Ward, get a head start. Nagin said the city would open the Superdome as a shelter of last resort for evacuees with special needs. He advised anyone planning to stay there to bring their own food, drinks and other comforts such as folding chairs. "No weapons, no large items, and bring small quantities of food for three or four days, to be safe," he said. The Louisiana National Guard had delivered three truckloads of water and seven truckloads of MRE's to the Superdome, enough to supply 15,000 people for three days.


Map of Louisiana parishes eligible for assistance.
Governor Blanco sends a letter to President George W. Bush asking him to declare a major disaster for the State of Louisiana, in order to release federal financial assistance.

In response to Governor Blanco's request, President Bush declared a federal state of emergency in Louisiana under the authority of the Stafford Act, which provided a, "means of assistance by the Federal Government to State and local governments in carrying out their responsibilities to alleviate the suffering and damage which result from such disasters,..."

The emergency declaration provided for federal assistance and funding, as well as assigned, by law, the responsibility for coordinating relief efforts with those government bodies and relief agencies which agree to operate under his advice or direction, to the FEMA federal coordinating officer (FCO). It also provided for military assets and personnel to be deployed in relief and support operations, although the Posse Comitatus Act imposes strict limitations on the use of Active Duty soldiers in law enforcement. 1701 Army National Guard and 932 Air National Guard are deployed (2633 total).


That night, National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield briefed President Bush, Governor Blanco, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, and Mayor Nagin on the status of Hurricane Katrina.




create just enough space to be final

make  a poem or make a picture
a oncing/ a volatile/ a continuum
vacuum/ blackhole/ suspended   variance    a tribe

what's the dream design to a bridging

can you echo in a no chamber vat
of collusion

i wish there was a better way to be lovely
i wish there was such a thing as a star anymore
and not just layered arts of extinction


Photograph:

Canal Outlets in New Orleans East

When we were kids, we played in the canal outlets, under the bridge overpasses along Morrison Rd. We rode our bikes unsupervised around neighborhoods, no cell phones. No social media. You could lay under the bridges to cool off and find odd stuff, discarded. You could peek over the railing and sometimes, we would pretend to be dead laying on the side of the bridge to see if anyone stopped.

They didn't.

Maybe we weren't good at playing dead because we didn't really know much of death.

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space."
-Einstein

Plague Journal:
8.9.20

The only commitment you can really honor in this life is to yourself. Love happens in the freedom to let others be all they are, without judgment, expectation or attachment.

Making a commitment to another is really an illusion.

The dissociative aspects of our culture are revealing an inability to deal with reality. And its deepest root lies in an inability to face death, suffering and mortality: Our aversion as toxic as our attachments.



Resource:
http://www.louisianaweekly.com/hurricane-katrina-then-and-now/

Would I tell you to stay?

Day 26:

A city is barricaded mansions with armed guards where caviar is flown in and champagne pours and still, bodies pool by the dark, hot doorways of the convention center waiting for water to be dropped that does not arrive while arranging the cloth over the corpse. Yes. A city can hold everything.

***************************************

Process Notes: 

TIME

Friday, August 26, 2005

At 1:00 AM EDT, maximum sustained winds had decreased to 70 mph (110 km/h) and Katrina was downgraded to a tropical storm. At 5:00 AM EDT, the eye of Hurricane Katrina was located just offshore of southwestern Florida over the Gulf of Mexico about 50 miles (80 km) north-northeast of Key West, Florida. Maximum sustained winds had again increased to 75 mph (121 km/h) and Katrina was upgraded again to a Category 1 hurricane.

At 5:00 PM EDT, the National Hurricane Center officially shifts the possible track of Katrina from the Florida Panhandle to the Mississippi/Alabama coast.[8] Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco declared a state of emergency for the state of Louisiana.[2] The declaration included activation of the state of Louisiana's emergency response and recovery program under the command of the director of the state office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness to supply emergency support services. Following the declaration of a state of emergency, federal troops were deployed to Louisiana to coordinate the planning of operations with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).[3] 922 Army National Guard and 8 Air National Guard are deployed. By 4:00 PM EDT, Katrina was upgraded to a Category 2 storm. Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, 66 miles (106 km) southeast of New Orleans. 

Photograph: 

What does it feel like to be in your body in the failure of a city?

What if fear is a type of memory.

What if what we fear is not what we think may happen, but memory of the repetition of our lives, the way we never escape time, but rotate around one lifetime, an infinity.

Tell me how you got here. Tell me if you remember clearly memory or is it like a story planted in your head. A telling. A series of photographs. What makes it real? evidence. Other faulty story tellers. Experience. What is ephemeral and cannot be held.

What if fear is simply the felt sense of what we have already tread.

To say I have already survived all of this, and so I refuse to entertain fear any more than I entertain memory.


Plague Journal
8.17.2020

as if you could ever know what a river is and separate from any part of you, it did not matter where we walked or walked away from, this catalogue of collected thoughts, the way weather has a way of turning

you can't really predict what you can't imagine anyway.

tangle destiny or entangle narrative. we tribed from source, all of us collecting, in the making of song.

"Truth and meaning are context bound"
-Derrida

"If I do not exchange my happiness
For the suffering of others
I shall not attain the state of Buddhahood
And even in samsara, I shall have no real joy.

-Shantideva


Resource:
Buddha, Ananda, & Katrina
https://www.mindfulnessbell.org/archive/2015/04/buddha-ananda-katrina

What are the limits of a city?

Day 25


shush. hushabye. sigh. shhhhhhhh. ssssssss(blinks)leepy. fais do do. (do) you dream. do. do. hi(ssssss) s(lither)s. you do(dream) don’t you. so long/ so (long) / the poem is a ritual of public and private performance / to see these words & images is to take part in the reciprocity of what i offer/ i am offering to hold it with you/ i am offering never abandon/ my love

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Process Notes: 

TIME

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Katrina strengthened to a Category 1 hurricane. Two hours later, Katrina made landfall on Keating Beach, just two miles south of the Fort Lauderdale international airport. Winds were 85 mph (137 km/h) and pressure was 989 mbar. During its passage, the eye of the hurricane moved directly over the office of the National Hurricane Center, which reported a wind gust of 87 mph (140 km/h). The strongest sustained winds in Florida was a report of 72 mph (116 km/h) on the roof of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in Virginia Key. The same station recorded a gust of 94 mph (151 km/h). Unofficially, wind gusts reached 97 mph (156 km/h) at Homestead General Aviation Airport.

Katrina lasted six hours on land over the water-laden Everglades, weakening to a tropical storm before reaching the Gulf of Mexico just north of Cape Sable. 

"the level of consciousness of one person holding the concentration for the group can change the entire room" 

-Dancing in the Flames

"if you are sad or depressed, you cannot influence reality"

-Dalai Lama

Photograph: 

Mississippi River from Arabi Levee, New Orleans Skyline in Background


-for we are the angel who treads on despair

"There is only a little grid. There is no exit."
-Plath

the strange reasons of ordinary objects

and the spring board of words

skin sprung to simple still life 

I bought a camera four months into the pandemic and taught myself how to shoot pictures. Mostly, I took pictures of graffiti because there was an abundance and it took me all over the city. And mostly, I could be alone and left alone. And maybe I thought too, I feel safer now in places where I could die and no one would even know for days.

I spent a lot of time by tracks watching the trains go by.

After Katrina, I thought I never want to have to leave my city again. I would have a panic attack any time I had to fly out of the city. The last place I flew to before lockdown, I had to ask a friend to drive me to the airport because I couldn't leave the house.

Now there are so many days I can't leave the house.

and New Orleans: I think, I can't leave even if I wanted to. If I wanted anything. I forget what it feels like now to want anything.

I am watching it all go by like those cars on the tracks.

I think less about traveling and more about the way the world crushes you under its wheels.

"there is nothing social about traumatic memory"
-The Body Keeps the Score 


Plague Journal:
8.17.20

i wanted to swerve the project. halfway thru to let it speak of joy and hope and resilience. i wanted to steer the poem even knowing i cannot.

i thought if i changed the inside of me, language would change. the shape of words, the thoughts, the ideas. the whole channel wiped clean enough. and to pass, a fluid calling.

i've spent so much time in neglected places. forgotten parts of this city. the parts no one sees. an invisible.

do you know what happens to a place not seen? to a thing made invisible by neglect.

it ceases to be solid. it accrues what is damaged. it is not well. these pockets of the city are not barren, but collect like a corner with its dust and debris. collected of loss and sadness and despair.

i would tread there. in the space of familiar. we can forget anything. if we try hard enough. the solidity of the self and the solidity of a city comes down to perception and belief. and if no one is looking. if no one sees it anymore.

a city becomes thin at the edges. and what enters in the thinness. if not protected at the borders.

what enters in our thinness. what passes where the crossroad has been abandoned.

TRIGGER WARNING
THIS VIDEO SHOWS  FLOODING AND PEOPLE TRAPPED IN THEIR HOMES
IT SHOWS LIVE FOOTAGE OF THE NEGLECT 

Resource: 

HOPELESS
https://youtu.be/GzVvGut-qrc

What do you see?

Day 24
Prayer: our city who art/ our city who art/ our city who art/ tell me everything you know about forgiveness

i (carry) your (name) in (my) mouth/ do (you) trouble/ a (city) is (its) people/ you’d do (well) to (remember) that/ a (city) rises and falls (on) the desire/ we (bring) to (survive) it

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Process Notes: 

TIME

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

 - strengthened into Tropical Storm Katrina



in the deepest cracks of your heart
what you seek is older than love


some beings map dreams, map a city
a card catalogue of spray painted sanity
we talked about how you we make it
where no one else makes beauty
find us there

mapper of dark places, locked by sound
i was made not afraid
designed close enough to call back
time is short&idon'twantorepeathesecycles
once upon a time, you get lost, megan
i downloaded too fast and burnt edge
made space and plummeted
falling so fast, you burn up before you land

anyone who tells you they want to be loved unconditionally
is a liar, we crave the border of love, the special costs
the choosing, if all you offer is without condition
to anyone, i promise, you will travel alone



"complex entanglement simply becomes no entanglement"



Photograph: 

OPEN YOUR EYES graffiti by READ on the Naval Base behind the End of the World Labyrinth


It's hard not to compare disasters, to mine for lack and less and where we stand now.

Like we had poetry readings, we had dinners, we had dancing and second lines; we had touch and comfort and community. We fought to rebuild. Others came to support us. We were both hated and cherished. And there was hope, an arc of ending and moving toward recovery.

And now, it's just endless days of slowly losing more of ourselves, more of all we worked for and built, more of less and less. No touch. No memories. No sounds shared. No support. No one is coming.

No reflection catches this: The silent ways we break apart alone.

What time does to us here. And where was love in all of this.

Self-transcendence means the universe is capable of going beyond what it has been before.

I felt us changed. Time folded and we rode out on fear. But would you give it to me.

The future maps the past. Time is never moving forward. It's turning.

Back to the beginning. What if there was no suffer but only opportunities to slip this net of desire constructed to hold us down to this story's old ways of unfolding.

What have you got to lose at this point by believing in everything?

That's where we are headed. Grief so deep; you let go the hold on thinking there is a limit to what you can think. A limit to what you can feel. A limit to what we can imagine. As if the only war hasn't always been that war...


Plague Journal:

6.17.20

i don't think you can be good at anything in a cruel world. i wish i still believed that poetry or art or anything really made a difference.



Resource:

Destroy This Memory
https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2010/08/17/129251257/misrach

What is empty space in a photograph?

Day 23

We’ve been here for 5 months. No, 15 years. (time is a problem) Love is the absence of any of us in the frame. Every day I wanted to reach for you, I had to ask if your rejection would touch me. And it is not until I understand that there is nothing to reject that I can ever reach for anything again. Fear will not serve you. 

***************************************

Process Notes: 

from here on out, none of this is easy. from here on out, we are wading in the water...

TIME 

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

What would eventually become Katrina started as Tropical Depression Twelve which formed over the Bahamas at 5:00 p.m. EDT (2100 UTC) on August 23, 2005, partially from the remains of Tropical Depression Ten, which had dissipated due to the effects of a nearby upper trough. While the normal standards for numbering tropical depressions in the Atlantic indicate that the old name/number is retained when a depression dissipates and regenerates, satellite data indicated that the surface circulation from tropical depression ten had separated from the mid level low and dissipated as it moved ashore in Cuba. A second tropical wave combined with mid-level remnants of Tropical Depression Ten north of Puerto Rico to form a new, more dynamic system, which was then designated as Tropical Depression Twelve. Simultaneously, the trough in the upper troposphere weakened, causing wind shear in the area to relax, thereby allowing the new tropical depression to develop.

In a later re-analysis, it was determined that the low-level circulation Ten had completely detached and dissipated, with only the remnant mid-level circulation moving on and merging with the aforementioned second tropical wave. As a result, the criteria for keeping the same name and identity were not met.

Photograph: 

Train tunnel near the End of the World


before katrina, we would write exquisite corpses at 17 poets! and put them in an empty wine bottle. after the reading, we would head over to the river and toss them in.

we were so young, and new orleans seemed like it would last forever then.

we had no idea how numbered our days were. no idea a city could disappear. no idea we could lose almost 1900 beings in a matter of days. no idea some of us would never return. no idea some of us would and still not survive.

all deaths were not by drowning. some deaths were slow to surface; it would take months or years for the dying to complete.

we are circling back to that time again. there is disaster and there is the fall out from disaster.

and we must cross all the chambers in order. and we must cross all channels to reach the shore.
and we must move through time in the fashion with which we perceive it.


Plague Journal: 
8.7.20

when memory is danger/ kali keep us safe

Resource: 

Long Night Moon 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s5Ms3dWCB8