Eye Before E > Timmy Caldwell

Blue Moon for the Crescent City

You can’t hide all night. Like the skinny rat who slinks into clubs on Frenchmen Street, eventually, you will draw attention to your hide and seek glow in the dark of a city without power soul shell.

Excuse me. Neal Cassady wants his beat back. A stack of flapjack Kerouac drifts into a silent harbor. This moon, your blue moon, is less rare than the storm that troubled this city, cradled by that silty river with all those repeating consonants.

Miss. Do you know what it means to Miss. New Orleans. Miss. Ms.

There are no women beat poets that we remember. Every system, every regime, fails. Ginsberg sang of Diane di Prima. One in a million who know Jack have ever heard a whisper of di Prima.

That candle that burns, there, fights to stay lit against winds from the old quarter, this candle Diane, la luna, the not-so-rare blue moon, a song, a rhapsodic nostalgic heart-tipped spear tossed blindly into this near-dark New Orleans night, stabs a live oak in the neutral ground between then and never.

My greasy fingers stained a page of poetry.

This poetry, flame-tempered and heart-hardened, branded me.

We both bear marks from our tango.

[Always] Never Compromise [Sometimes]

Mississippi River, New Orleans

I never asked you to carry more than my weight. Your slate bones shine your darkness. Our world repairs itself for the next named chaos.

Does our world pull itself down in increments so we have something to lean our tender backs into until the new storm?

The next time I ride you over these streets, the clouds will be nameless. The empty cage of blame waits for an occupant.

The slate shingle in my bag, torn from a rooftop, bears his name.

Sometimes when I see a fountain I try to imagine how many units of volume it takes to fill it. How many bottles of Orange Crush? How many shots of whiskey? Sometimes, I try to imagine how many tears would have to be shed to fill a fountain, and I realize more than I have ever cried in my life. If I felt sad, I feel better thinking of that.

"There are still purists who hold onto that idea that the iPhone is not still a real camera, or doesn’t make a real image, and quite frankly, I think those arguments are bullshit. It’s the same argument that people made when color film was invented, or that painters made when photography was invented. People don’t like change, and they don’t like to adapt. There’s nothing real about black and white film photography that is any more or less real than me taking a picture on my iPhone."

Ben Lowy (via photographsonthebrain)

(via dunnraw)

Esplanade Ave, New Orleans. One of many trees on the neutral ground. I have decided to claim it as mine.

dunnraw:

This was written in response to a Village Voice article by Maura Johnston. She doesn’t like the music, which is fine, but also claims it is devoid of content, which is misguided. The contention here is that the video games to which the song refers range far beyond Grand Theft Auto. Spent more…

tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?

I was three or four years old and something fragile gets broken in my living room. I think I might have been playing ball in the house, or I was innocent. I just recall feeling terrible and in trouble.