Scattering Ashes
New Orleans, 2009

Arrived in New Orleans thinking
I’d stay for a few days
But she seduced me and I knew I had a task here
I wasn’t sure what it was so I did what I do best
I meandered the city
Until I helped bring his ashes to Frenchman St.
To rest among the freaks and lost souls
And felt the city release her hold on me

Mama Love calls me
“We’re coming to New Orleans.”
Yay, I am excited to see my first set of friends from my past along the journey
We meet up mid-afternoon and walk about
I’ve been finding my interest in people to
dissolve quickly and have been taking off after an hour or so, but I feel a lovely settling
with faces from my past
I soon find out the reason for their visit

“We’re here to scatter her ex-fiance’s ashes”
“He committed suicide.”

I still am coming to terms with my intuitive gifts but my connection to
fathers who commit suicide is profound
Even at this moment, I’m living with a man whose father killed himself a few years ago
How many fathers kill themselves?
And why is it that I meet
so many of their left-behind loves?
What role do I play in all this?

We walk up to the room at the Ritz
to drop off bags
Both TV’s are on in both rooms
tuned to the Mardi Gras parades
happening
just outside the pulled blinds of the window

We sit in the space with the family of the dead man, his step-sister and parents
The step-sister almost the same age as her step-father
I’m fed raisinettes and a milky way bar
Words bounce
 
What I find intriguing is that no part of me
feels like I want to leave
I know I need to be right here,
with this group of people
A family mourning the death
of a son, a brother, a lover

In town to scatter his ashes among the wild energy of alcohol, beads and exposed breasts

It is Mardi Gras in all of its maddess and excess

We pass hours meandering the streets
Chatting, taking photos, squeezing past crowds

We pause in the square next to the church
I feel an energy shift but ignore it
A moment later, my friend collapses
I stand there observing the two women with their arms wrapped around one another
I taste pure sadness
She has a child with him.  She left him because he was too unstable. 
And now she stands crying in the city he loved
She pulls her head back, and I see her face

Her face covered in thick blood
Almost immediately the fortune teller at a nearby booth brings a red and orange scarf and
she bleeds into it
We stand in our huddle on Mardi Gras day
As drunk costumed souls slide past

Mixing blood, pain, alcohol, life, death and
naked breasts

Her bleeding slows
ML wipes blood gently off her face
Tenderness, tenderness, tenderness
nuzzles into the pain
 
We walk as a group, often with me leading the way
I know the city well now
Comments aimed at me are endless
“You are so beautiful…love the hair…wow, your eyes…wow…”

What would it be like to live without men
trying to fuck me with their eyes?

“Where are you taking us?” they notice a drop in people and a change in the energy
We’re now on Frenchman Street
with its freaks and wilder energy
“This feels like where
I’d like to scatter B’s ashes,” she says

If I had to have my ashes scattered
in a volatile city park then here is the spot
Endless entertainment of lost living souls seem like an ideal match
 
Later, we pause at a decorated hearst
covered with plastic animals, coins, and beads
“I just wish it didn’t say God Bless You”
 
Next to an old house,
we all notice the sky at the same time
Clouds are moving in a way
like they’re about to eat us
Something about the sky holds us in this spot
I feel like we could be in the spot where
I watched plastic bags get picked up by the air
Swirled around upwards, suspended in the air in gentle patterns and deposited on the roof

Immediately I knew I was watching
a spirit carry them upwards

Now I wonder if it was in this spot and
if it had been B
 
After I leave them, I return to Frenchman
Sit in a glass window of a club alone
Countless people stumble by
unable to take the next step
I have never seen people use their full
concentration to take a step
And for it to then be at an angle or sideways

I watch the old homeless woman
watch the drunkenness

Men try to catch my eye but I am clearly in a space where none can join
I sit almost across the park where
his ashes are scattered with B
who will never see his child grow up.

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