The Water Sermon: "It's God's Swill"

                                           The Trump dump: "à cause de moi, encore Le Deluge".

 The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf clutch and sink into the wet morass. The wind crosses the brown land making an unbearable roar, tosses the downed tree branches like twigs, tears up bridges, chews through tarmac, floods empty parking lots whose remaining vehicles stand in silent testament to the ravaging being dealt as the Gulf moves inland, temporarily claiming as its own what is rightfully the province of landlubbing humanity. The resultant inundation carries in it the flotsam and jetsam of the consumerist culture of throwaway lives. Empty bottles and ragged papers, used tissues and cardboard boxes, cigarette butts and baby diapers all mix in a disposal of brown swirling waters lashed by relentless winds insisting on tearing down any vestige of habitable structures still standing. The natives have departed. 

Along with other testimonies of warm southern nights; departed and left no addresses, now have no addresses to which to return. Drowned rats float by, downed poles intermittently crackle with blue sparks, as if to inform one that the entire coast is now shipwrecked; hunkered down we dare not Sally forth. The few with radios can still hear the forecasts of continuing deluge on one station while the other blares out the malicious Limbaugh cant, the Trucker Carlson rant, the fracking regimes crescendo of denial of reality intermixes and gets confused with its anger over government mandates to wear a strip of cotton to cover one's nose, one's mouth, lest you transmit a microbe that will kill someone else while leaving you unaffected. Right to Life is only extended to the unborn: Your right to life ends with the snip that frees you from your mother's placental mooring.

Churning churning churning. Oh Lord thou pluckest me out.  My feet are in sopping sneakers; my heart is in my mouth. After the event we wept. Were promised a "new start". I made no comment. I connect nothing with nothing. Neither broken fingernails with dirty hands, nor Nature's fury with acts of Man. Kind's cruel onslaught on nature as we progress from the path of benign indifference down the road to malign animosity; repaying Nature’s indifference with this machine-enabled suicidal rampage that life in the 21’st century has thus far proven to be.

At this violet hour the skies are painted an angry hue, humans shelter in place idling in wait like a taxi's throbbing engine, hesitant to return home and see what's been left by the receding sea. The promise to drain the swamp has never sounded so hollow as everyone, everything, has instead become the swamp. The mosquitos that savaged Louisiana are the next item on our disaster menu, as swarms of them descend on man and beast alike to worry your livestock, bite your babies, hamper your efforts to return to the new normal that has yet again moved a step further away. Trying to perceive it is akin to looking through a telescope backwards. Your brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over ... But for how long? The river sweats oil and chemicals; the barges drift, old and terrible, with the turning tides; the debris rides out to sea, its disposal free; but along with escaped gators, it's taken our refrigerators, yet we're all in the same position: no jobs, no money to pay back the loans that enabled their acquisition.  

The sense of loss is overwhelming, as though a current under the sea had picked our pockets and took their contents out to sea with the tide. The myth of Sisyphus is now our daily guide. We chew the tough meat of reality sandwiches grilled on a melting tarmac. The taste of oil, the smell of asphalt permeates everything yet we fail to see any of the impacts mankind's abuse of the most precious resources of modern man has wrought. Rickety electrikity will be restored haphazardly; knowing as we do that its chances of weathering the next inevitable onslaught are as slim as the poles its wires are festooned from.  As the energy costs to deliver energy fast approach those needed to produce it, their sunk costs get sunk like pirate treasure at the bottom of the sea as the inundation nation sees its shorelines swallowed up as fast as and with as little to show for one's outlay and trouble as a government budget deficit.

Arbitrary Nature has left the windshield full of tears while bleak rainy gaps of time get lost in desolation's speculation as we espy the ruin left of our lives by their sporadic supernatural illumination from lightening flashes while entertaining ourselves with visions of Our Lady of the Freeway trundling toward us with open arms; her garments cascade down like cataracts into the swirling rivulets of muck lapping at her knees and muddying her celestial raiment. Perhaps Jesus saves, but Mary spends. While us, with ignorant judgments, created this mistaken world from which we avert our eyes and make up lies to blanket the bed we made and in which we can now get no sleep; so we lie in its despoliation rather than face our worst nightmares. The truth be told we can't behold the wonders we have wrought, nevermind the blunders they've begot.

Water slips down the broken glass of a movie marquee, (children under five get in for free), in what's left of our second-hand city while down at harborside the ships, once aligned in quiet dignity now lie on their sides in yards, their masts splintered rails; seen from faraway, obscured in grey mists, they look like the Western Front, mindless destruction on a monumental scale. While enter the seagull with an inhuman shriek like a vulture, sentinels watching over rusty harbor iron dockworks, barnacled rocks dripping under shattered wharves, slime on the wall where an unmanned rowboat was docked and chained; it floats by still moored to its now unmoored piling that it pulls in tow. Under our watch we watch what we have wrought rot from the center; only the shopping mall remains there enshrined, full of fur coats and fishing equipment, while mad commission-only salesmen in polyblend suits will soon hawk their wares on the thoroughfares wondering why customers won't buy as they float by and their children cry and they shoo away flies from their forlorn offspring's eyes. The world's pre-eminent shithole country will soon offer them soup from rotting docks while six thousand anti-tax Tea Party members demand Federal government assistance, sick already of the daily plate of compassionate conservatives' meal of hopeful beans.