distance.

I still remember how the distance tricked us. It lead us helplessly by the wrist into a pit to be devoured.

I still remember how we held so strong to this.

Though we had never really settled on a way out. I still remember the silence, and how we'd always find a way to turn and run to our mistakes.

I still remember how it all came back just to fall apart again.

tonight I realized how much new orleans is a part of me and I of it. at monkey hill with the best people in the world and I imagined us all there when the hurricane rolled through. and it would be too much hurt to bother you. I couldn't handle lossing this place.

please send some snow, some snow for Johnny.

listening to christmas music alone in my apartment after doing the dishes. missing the box from the fish market that held all of our ornaments. missing drinking beer in your basement and the smell of cheap wrapping paper. me and my brother would stay up all night long and mad a snow hill in the front yard, by morning mixed with dirt and a chocolate buzz. I used to be enamored with christmas. it meant not working, ice skating with friends, going to flatirons crossing mall with rachel moyer. come home from the mall smelling like every scent bed bath and body works sells.

lets play.

so there we were driving home laughing in your car, the New Orleans roads bumping us up and down and feeling broken hearted and flinging lose change all over the front seat. And I thought about all those nights we spent in the taco bell parking lot, smiling, getting hot beans and cheese down our faces. Colorado sometimes I need to be taught the way to come home.

And then I remember the night that I fell in love with you. we went to this party not far from where you used to live. and this was when everyone moved away and moved on and I was getting older. we walked in and took shots out of vodka out of the freezer with the hosts. I give you credit in this new environment. we sat on the dirty carpet of the apartment and wished my friend a happy birthday. We swam in the pool in the lobby, I remember looking at you and loving you, and loving how much you didn't fit into my world. We walked home with dripping hair. stoned and drunk we walked into your apartment holding hands and shivering. You turned the bathtub on for me so I could warm up. And as I sat in the tub i started to cry, my chest filling up with pain like water. and I sat in the water not making much noise. I cried and cried like a kid. I felt like the home that I had both loved and hated was never coming back. And then you came in the bathroom sat at the edge of the tub and hugged me wet and naked. overwhelming overwhelming was all I could say. and you said you understood. and in some strange way we had seen god together in the bathroom that night and I fell in love with you.


So tonight as I feel you fading, my most comforting lover I remember that night in the colorado winter.


But tonight as we get on the highway in New Orleans as we pass the superdome with the music loud and I feel good. and this Amtrack train pulls up next to us as it approaches the New Orleans station and I wonder about the people on it. Are they coming to NO for the first time? Are they moving here? are they in love? did someone die?

And so we roll down our windows and yell at the top of our lungs:

WELCOME TO NEW ORLEANS!

mess.

I left my story in a barn so someone else could keep milking it. I left my story in the fitting room; it didn't fit me anymore. I left my story at the hospital because it wouldn't stop bleeding. I left my story at the rest stop; it needed a rest. I left my story at the body shop because it always wanted a different one. I left my story with some cash so it could never say, "poor me". I left my story without saying where I was going because I didn't want it to follow me; it never even noticed I was gone.


My heart is simply a mess.

colorado.

last night i really had a dream about the hurricane that came over the mountains. i was holding a jig saw puzzle. when the wind finally came into the mountain valley the puzzle flew out of my hands and into the wind, breaking into little pieces. and in an instant landed in my mother's mouth. and she tried to yell into the wind over me.

and colorado what if the hurricane did come? what if the aspens were gone. and what about all of those houses that we lived in? what would happen to them? what about the dog that died and the ashes that we left in the backseat of your toyota? would they float into the air. would the ash get into your eyes? i can barely talk about you colorado. but i can tell you somewhere in colorado there is a dry weezing love of mine. of the basement that smelled like pot and the buddhist flags that hung in your windows. the massive hippy parties that took place in blue school buses, where they cried and danced. wore flowers in their hair and told the children about the government that would and could find them. but its funny of us are not really from you colorado. we are just transplants. as allen ginsberg would say, denver is lonely for its lost, and transplanted. but tonight colorado i am going to remember all of car rides where I had to ask your permission to roll down the windows. and the car sickness i got while smelling your old fish coolers as we rode up the side of a mountain in your old ford explorer.

and we took hot showers in the empty lake house to warm up from the lake that had a black bottom.

11

The Dream of New Orleans
New Orleans was named by the Lord himself, the lord of the breeze and the smell of your mothers necklaces.

In New Orleans there are people who have purple skin. They sit upright in the air as if held up by invisible chairs. These are the sacred ones.

There are plants that cannot grow without stagnant old bath water.

If you have a dream in New Orleans you will wake up with a swollen heart and blurry vision. You can hear a dream approaching a few days out it cries like a hungry baby and roars like an army. You might wake up making the noises of dried out instrument.

You never want to eat alone because some lady with a duck will find you and contaminate your soup. She might ask you where you have been and where your mother is.

And you don’t want to talk about your mother.


In New Orleans there is an animal called the Marble and it eats shrimp tails and the remnants of your eggs florentine. It has eyeballs in its stomach and only comes out in the summer.

There are a race of people here and they are the only ones who can hold a chalice of sea water, and they will be the ones who get to sing the last songs the world ever hears. And these are the people who get to pave the roads and they pave them with residue from the streetcar seats. The sweat from under your legs and the grease left in your hair. They use fake gold and elephant ears to make the lines in the road for you to follow.

In New Orleans no one is honest. And everyone had sex last night, to the sound of a housing filling with water. You can tell the future here from the poets that bring their type writers out of their houses on Saturday nights, they tell you to go home before you commit and unknown crime to an unknown lover.

And you don’t want to talk about your lover.

In New Orleans people grieve in public, the drag queens hang onto door frames as they push their giant fragile bodies into the night air to get a look at the fire that has been burning and the bodies that have been feeding it. And they cry big sloppy tears that runs mascara into the drains.

They use tubas for trousers.

In New Orleans if you go out into the street after dreaming and hear the sound of weezing you must go back inside because it is a bad omen. You can come back out with the Magnolia gets chopped down and your mothers clothes have finally gone to Goodwill.

There are warrior women who fight on the streets with silk horses with the names of slaves stitched onto their flanks. They fight while the men cheer, they drink out of large long glasses and speak a language you don’t know if you will be able to learn.

The water is so warm in New Orleans rubies crystalize in your bathtub sprinkle over your feet when you bathe. You listen to the songs of the mystics alone in the trees and you spy on the horses the warrior women have abandoned. You suck on popsicles made of saffron and the skin of a lake fish.

In New Orleans you can let your nails grow long and take days off from work to make sure they are growing correctly.

In New Orleans they don’t title any of their books.

When you drive in New Orleans you like to have somebody following you as you drive down the road.