Collection

You love our blues, our souls hung our spirituals sung and carried on breezes yet deny the truths that bring us to our knees our sorrows burrowed in battered hearts wounds deep reopened and salted

Cry for Katrina's dead, mourn our departed minstrels gone long before them that smiled and crooned, kept secret the politics of blue gloom notes like Satchmo spreading wide his lips with appeasing pearl whites gritted.

You love the blues, the jazz, the cool and hot but know not the people nor their lot nor demons wrestled, angels kissed death wails howled nightly 'neath shit birthing music, the beauty, grace welded exquisite creative genius hunkered to ankles, hips hearts weighted in painful joy of drunken stupor cultivating survival, incubating dreams splitting tongues bursting the spiritblood you love, you mourn, for which you do mock funerals but why since what you love's not died?

You see the art but not the artists nor care to know the hearts that birthed the art of New Orleans nor her children who sing the blues crude beautifully on the news. But you'll love that blues too once the City's paupers have hammered it and glamoured it between tinkled ivory, the gleam of grinning trumpets and the depths of distant fingers upon a bass.