Revel on the Pontchartrain

Let the Dionysian reign,

jazz staccato dreams bursting

beatifically within kinesthetic hearts.

Jack, I remember the carnivorous impulse

to devour the night and drink whole

the entirety of experience;

I slake myself deeply, elegiacally,

recalling the corrosive soul toll

extracted upon thee.

Ossified amidst illusory cantos,

forging messiahs for the pilgrim soul;

if only eternity were a capturable entity to be

bottled, distilled, and imbibed

within the minutia of flashbulb moments…

N’awlins birthed perspectives anew,

coaxed flames from the depths of dead space

through a totality of bayou immersions—

where waters of past and present turn brackish

in waves of saline epiphanies.

On the banks of thee time staves impossibility;

allures in its impermanence,

devastates in its rawness.

Monger of Panacea

Behind the bar the world skews wildly,

indiscretions unfolding minute by minute,

hailings in foreign tongues, alien names yowled without grace—

these are the hallmarks of my trade.

The long, debaucherous nights

spent enduring plumes of woe, misery made tangible.

Hawked and fawned over, leered and lambasted;

the libations, a steady deluge into hellish maws

bleeding greenery and obfuscating sanity—

the corrosive toxicity of panacea’s allure.

Its taxing, the constant facade of fabricated frivolity,

the decrepit mask adorned daily to coax lust and greed;

extracting its toll by scouring decency.

Yet our broken circuitry demands salvation,

fiendishly seeks absolution in hovels and midden heaps—

slovenly we oblige: immolate and imbibe.