yonder

I don’t care, New Orleans. The only thing worth caring about is the infinite reach of our mind through galaxies and the meandering of the Holy Spirit dispensing freedom. And besides I was arrested there on a noisy street sleeping in a stolen Thunderbird.

But not for the Thunderbird. It was for suspicion, suspicion mind you, of the murder of someone I never found out the name of.

Arrested with me were David-Michael-Zeke -- the guy with three sets of identities -- and “fish eyes” who may have had a vitamin deficiency or perhaps a hormone chaos of some sort. They were sleeping in the Thunderbird too and were both as white as me on a black street under neon.

I feel some peace now that this street is under five feet of standing water but you can still loot the top shelves from the liquor store. I have a greater peace that something big is returning the city to the gulf and the people in it to a continent of smell, death and humid survival.

I have nothing against them. In fact I know some. There was the self-described former senator , drunk and chronically pukey but with a good straw hat, torn a bit thrown into the cell with me and the others and released early. Not like us. There was the cheerful guard who said he had pissed on our worm sandwiches. He had spat in the Toxic Tang.

The bloody marine released without charge in the morning before we were is maybe still in the National Guard, somewhere else or who maybe now is there “helping” the ten thousand poor people locked up in the stadium ready for deportation for their own good to prevent looting treasures in the black city from those tall buildings with the emergency generators still on to keep their logos burning. The logos are reflecting on the rising water. Is this how the whole thing will end -- in floating shit?

I was released in the morning after the last minute attempt, a reduced charge from murder down to vagrancy, was dropped. I had ten bucks. They never got on to David-Michael-Zeke. They never got on to the Thunderbird. They hadn’t heard of the place on the plates. Manitoba, where the fuck is that? Might as well be Bongo Land.

So all the rest of us were released with contempt. We three whites and ten thousand others who were arrested that night for suspicion. Out for the time being. I was advised to leave the city and the state. To evacuate. The judge did not understand my accent. He thought that when I said “not guilty” I was asking for orange juice. He told me that this was no time for that. That is how far I was away from home. He told me himself I was too far. The cops asked if I was one of those Cuban niggers. They said I should go back to Africa with them. I actually did that. Just as he said. Just as I was told.

The others, like now, went on to their promised land.

That old Holy Spirit is flooding the mind with analogy. Other places. Animals two by two, the spires of Atlantis. Bombed, flooded , drowned, covered in locusts, burnt and scattered into the desert. Blasting through a nebula on a million tortured comets. The neurons of something prophetic.

No, I don’t care, and this is a terrible thing because once I did so much.