Bishop's Karma

Ash makes the water muddy in this crescent of a town,
The blood of memory pooling around the edges and the rubble.
It's the memory that feeds the dilemma as the ghosts of notes float around while
The water takes over like you wouldn't believe--
And this is a dry heat, too, for here, the air thick as molasses, lungs unable to breathe.
On the rooftops there's writing in tape calling out for Jesus, professing faith;
It's something of which I can't conceive--
Nature's the God of this town, choking and breeding.
I say the Holy Spirits are all woven together and they are they and you--and I, a consecrated meeting.
We're all drowned out and the crescent crumbles under the burden of times yet unperceived.
Here, the marshes dream achingly of regeneration,
They're in synch with the people, praying for Amazing Grace—

A futile inclination because
The prayer's shut out—

I hear them screaming, instead,
"I seen the Devil come down like he own the place."

New Orleans is a place of contradiction. It is a place of despair in the most raw of forms alongside hope. Though the hope is fragile, it pervades every inch of air in every person left out of fortune. They seek their fortune in the form of Chance, a simple Chance, and that stirs in me more hope upon looking and more grief, because the need for that simple Chance persists.

I don't want this to be a sob tale, because the storm sobbed enough on that city and caused more sobbing afterward. Besides, this is a tale for myself, and it's for figuring out what it is I'm feeling. The land is shrinking rapidly but no one seems to care, at least no one who has the power to act on fixing the problem. Two-thirds of the people are ghosts in the form of memory, alive but unable to come back because the color of their skin and the number behind the dollar sign belonging to their name isn't big enough for the ones who claim authority. I wonder if what I feel is sadness or pity or happiness that (though it be few and far between) at least a handful put in their Time instead of writing off "help" in the signing of a check that makes it into some bureaucrat's pocket instead of the people's. I wonder if the feeling is frustration at the fact that 90% of those people giving Time really understand the gravity of the situation at all.

The feeling is confusion, at least at the moment. I don't know what to make of it, or of myself. It brings me back to my childhood and the things I hate--segregation, the War, the allowance of prejudice, the fact it exists and not exists, but is innate within the consciousness of every single one of them. I hate the fact that they force me to notice, too. I hate the fact that it's a factor because all I ever saw was the human race until my innocence got me in trouble and I had to learn that the shade of brown makes all the difference in this society of ours, that the belief system you're born into is a right of passage for other people's hate.

I remember children throwing stones in a moment when they forgot their separate races and united in their senseless hatred of mine. I remember running away from them but the stones had already hit me and in many ways I'm still bleeding just as this Crescent City's still drowning.
I've seen war zones before. The media does not desensitize me to them. Reality makes me more apalled than ever before each time I face it again. Unfortunately, I face it everyday, whether it be my physical surroundings or an image in my head from a memory. Then I understand why fantasy has always been so seductive.

Don't you?