Well Bottom Blues

I grew up on Robert E. Lee
Boulevard, learned all the racial epithets 
from my grandfather, recall the genteel 
way my grandmother said “nigra.”

I watched the panicked retreat down
St. Bernard Avenue along the bayou
from the relentless advance of Black
dentists and their encroaching Volvos.

I fled from that torch-lit crowd,
moved toward the Quarter where 
my great aunties lived when I was a kid, 
Sunday cocktail-and-cigarette “maidens”

living stories of Royal Street bohemia,
where I was allowed to stoop sit, learned
to live the original New Orleans way;
landed in the 7th Ward across Esplanade

from The Treme; bought cold beers
three for a dollar from the N. Villere
corner drugstore, sat smoking on my steps,
hanging with any thirsty passing neighbor.

I was already saved from original sins 
by music, Nevilles everywhere and 
the old R&B from Cosimo and
Toussaint on restaurant booth jukeboxes.

I was ready to enter the sacred heart
of New Orleans, the one the tourists
hear but only through a tour guide's
fabricated filter, just a murmuring echo

beneath the daiquiri bar cover bands’
music, the secret rooms behind Elvis.
I divided dinners between Mandina’s
and Eddie Baquet’s on Law Street,

ate pork chop sandwiches out of 
shopping carts, horns up the street,
sat patiently through second line snarls
and school bands’ practice marches.

I still shuffle like a wind-up cymbal
monkey due to my genetic handicap 
but discovered the acceptance of 
people who greet you on the street 

goes everywhere you care or dare 
to go. When someone asks to buy 
a cigarette, give them two and they 
will have your back down the block.

Every corner store is my own if 
I'm thirsty. It takes me 20 minutes
to buy cigarettes if the clerk’s chatty
and I greet everyone hanging outside.

It helps to always wear a hat (not
a cap unless its Saints or Pelicans)
and walk like you’ve got ear buds in
when you don’t, moving on the 2 & 4.

I call it Creolized, what's stirred up 
in North America's only melting pot, 
where the Anglo disappears like 
onions reduced to crystal perfection 

if you'll just stop to listen, not just to 
the music but to the person listening 
beside you when the band breaks, find 
out that you share some special place 

older than the flood, and how much
you both miss it, where you each 
went to school, which bus you ride,
where you go to catch parades

where you heard Dinerral died
who and what you lost in the flood
because in those years right after
we mostly all washed up together.