“New Orleans, Always, in the Rear View Mirror,” She Seethes Ecstatically
Randy Ray
2008-01-24
Peaches En Randalia #23 The motel we’re staying in is right next to a brick courtyard that used to be a holding chamber for slaves—Africans, prisoners of war back in the dark continent, they were shipped as human sardines, urinating and defecating, one atop the other, sordid mathematics created outrageous biology on a ship crossing the Atlantic. New Orleans has them bolted to a brick wall, a brick wall that someday will be a school house for little white children and a teacher, brick school house burns down, little white children and a teacher perish. Justice? No. Two atrocities don’t create equality. The black slaves died together and so did those white children. Teacher? Oh, she had a lesson or two, but the cruel flames of death mock, mock her arrogant indolence in the face of reality: how can one be used as barter from the Old to the New? Segue from Old Treachery to the New Sublime: Natives offer friendship, Europeans push the Natives west, continually west until less than one percent, less than one percent survive, mathematics disrupt biology, Thomas Jefferson negotiates the Louisiana Purchase, Tennessee Williams documents the Louisiana Refuse, Andrew Jackson encourages slavery, Abraham Lincoln emancipates slaves, John Wilkes Booth murders Lincoln, several assassinate Kennedy and elect Nixon who contributes compost to Southeast Asia and the American Dream, the dream that “this land is your land”: Woody Guthrie begets Bob Dylan who echoes Theodore Roosevelt who introduces environmental issues onto the political platform, wooden frame sags— Sinister allure evil—once deceased, resurrected anew. Eaten from within by human termites as Roosevelt begets Gore who tries to recombine environmental issues and politics and finds that one cannot exist with the other; we have built our American Capitalist system upon acquisition and expansion: laws of nature create and replace, laws of man destroy and eliminate—self begets self, we stand in the black evening; eve: blackening; mood: somber; brow: constrained; mind: gazing at a brick wall-- ’riting…’riting on the wall of history, we are staying in the room directly opposite the brick wall of slave doom…“Patrons of this very hotel you see before us,” explains the French tour guide, “have reported unexplained—”
“We have had problems with our camera, as well,” offers a worried tourist.
“They awake to find the roll completed,” ignores the tour guide.
“Do you—” interjects the tourist.
“Strange apparitions,” continues the tour guide, “film rolls completely used up when, in fact, they had only shot five to ten pictures.”
“—think someone—”continues the tourist.
“Later, photos are developed, and the remaining shots are of them asleep,” reports the tour guide.
“—maybe—” ponders the tourist.
“Somehow, something, or someone that once was, had taken pictures of these hotel guests while they were sleeping,” concludes the guide. “We cannot verify—”
“Are you saying I believe someone has been in our room, too?”
“I don’t know what you believe; do you believe in anything?”
Randy Ray urges everyone to study, look inward and then, get out and vote in 2008.
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