For The Lost Poets of New Orleans Who Frequent Mardi Gras

FOR THE LOST POETS OF NEW ORLEANS
WHO FREQUENT MARDI GRAS

(And for all other Primordial Realists out there.)


You know we’re forever writing poems
about our modern age
enhanced by printing presses, computers
and space age scanners,
but what about the poets,
or near-poets,
who lived for thousands of years
without an outlet
for their complex despair?

You know they existed.

These poets,
or near-poets, who lived
through blood-thirsty monarchies,
cultivating illusions the size of fists
waving through clouds of locusts
in a 4th Century field of mud and millet.

These poets, or near-poets,
could tell us the truth
starting from prehistory
to Alexander,
and the Crusades,
and about the genocide
of imagination
that’s existed for so many years.

Trial by Ordeal –-
how unimaginative can you get?

These poets saw it all,
the rape of the Magi
and the indolence of kings
leaving the Magi’s tent door
open for magpies to swoop down
from their scientific perches
and devour his succulent entrails,
followed by the systematic
suppression of women who lived
as slaves to the slaves
of sanctioned Hedonism.

These poets, or near-poets,
deserve a moment
of silence
for their lives without expression,
for their violent melancholy,
as we dip our dented
tin cups
into the outrageous human stream
flowing tonight down Canal Street
rattling the bourgeois suburbs
of New Orleans.

Alan Britt

Posted over on Strange Road