 this poem I want to be very kind of like explicit. It's actually a love story but it's also a long story so it kind of tells both sides of like being in the Orleans and like loving the Orleans but also experiencing like negative things up in the Orleans too. So I hope that you can enjoy it and I hope that it tells the truth at least as much. Welcome to America's third world amusement park. Dirty Disneyland but the rides never stop. This city, this city has a circus for a heart and a plantation for a brain. All of its sideshow freaks on jagged rows of teeth. The streets have pothole cavities the size of bathtubs. Come take a ride down the throat of our St. Charles street car. If you close your eyes and pretend that you don't speak the language you can hear the metal wheels warring going any further down this rabbit hole or wrong all of our oak trees on wooden limbs of lightning. Their narrow knees stand as if they are dying to get away. Come and join the cavalcade of drunken souls pissing freely in the wind retching aimlessly in the gutter every year. The crowds come amassed around the big paper mache flows. They plunge their arms into the night skies if the objects falling had become currency in their hands a hungry while it's they be howling yo throw me something mister. They pray the screams be quelled with catches frat boys so drunk off their own privilege they trample children in their wake. Shopping carts appear from nowhere selling flashing plastic swords and jester hats and feathered boas and spun sugar and candied apples and many other things you're sure to forget about in the morning in the night. You can hear the marching bands rumbling down my city streets all of the percussionists have chose to trade in their arms for machine guns. The fat bottom black girls spending batons like their mamas did mixing the rhythms of the drum with the tarp twisted cobblestone pavement here come the crews on horseback reminding everyone the clan is still invested in the south. They don colored sheets to hide their drunken grins. The cysts of animosity will be drained tonight with a ball of beads tossed to the face of someone that fits the description but don't forget our new Stockholm syndrome ride where the african americans wear blackface and grass skirts handing out coconuts and calling it privilege. The tours come ready every year to hand in their virtues for concoctions designed to top back their inhibitions while I'm from we just say orange and not orange. We say Earl and not oil. We say fail before you try. We say command before request but when a force of nature comes to destroy you we say nothing. You prepare for the person you will be on the other side. When your country's president leaves you hanging out to dry you can feel how long a body of lies can hang mid-air how it rocks like a twin tower set to implode at the site of your world crumbling around you your eyes will wish themselves blind. The depression will turn your chest into a cavern. At the site of blue tarps gray bodies and black bags it will make stoic in your face. At the sea and inning of your drowning city plastered across the globe it will reanimate the corpse. When the newest casters come to pick at the car keys it will make limber all of the dead in you. When the new pilgrims come like a Greco-Roman army with the God complex the size of the Louisiana Purchase it will lead to a synaptic blitzkrieg. When the hipster tramplants come with their polyunamide states and their tins so high in the air they forget they are standing on the bodies of natives everything inside of you will say rage it will say destroy and I say New Orleans. Your soul is the holy a million churches could never achieve. Hurricane Rita Ida Katrina we still keep track of the amount of cast that you left open that unfaithful day since you landed at our doorstep we've been rebuilding ever since and much much like our cemeteries we now stand upright while aiming for our throats you broke open our rib cage it's been swinging ever since you spun like a punch drunk on a Friday night looking for a way out blast and backhandedly your way through downtown the size of your wingspan it clapped like a pelican with the upright base this this is not a song we choose to remember blues has always been a part of our heritage but we didn't hear the tune like this since hurricane Betsy down in New Orleans we all know hearts break like levies but it's going to take a lot more than wind to rain on our parade see we we are greater than hurricanes we are not idle warships with punctured sails and windless lungs we are the anchors standing on our toes and the tycoms rushing back to crack us in the chest I'm from a city full of saturday night centers and sunday morning saints I'm here to tell you our indian dancers don't bring no rain these hands these hands have mixed martyr and play taps in the same day we do not fear water we no longer fear death and we refuse to be scared by the whispers of a maelstrom even though you cannot see through our umbrellas know that we're smiling on the other side and from the city where we celebrate it all I wrote this to honor the once living angels who now hold our halos this poem is for the survivors it's for the stayers it's for the men and women with the balls and the ovaries the size of the superdome it's for the long shots it's for the freaks it's for the burlesque dancers painting themselves gold in the cold of december it's for who that sundays red bean mondays and all of those brass bands blowing under our bridge this poem is for new warlands this poem is for us thank you