Oh, Katrina your wrath has come to me
My home's in Louisiana
And now it's out to sea
City of the Big Easy,
Steeped in river culture,
And the primal roots of American history,
Jazz and bourbon,
Zeidico and moonshine,
Cajun French Creole African American Caucasian
Rhythm and spice
Gumbo and rice
Why'd they let you swing in the wind?
You cried for help and the cavalry never came
Was it out crusading in the Holy Land?
Questing for the holy barrel of oil?
You left your FEMA,
Inept and headless government worm,
To ooze in and take control
Pulling rank and stalling rescue efforts,
While waiting for orders,
From an uninformed and disinterested president
Whose singular mind
Remained focused on his truncated vacation
And his cash cow ---
A distant war whose main objective
Is to line the pockets of his friends ---
With the riches the oil could reap
And the whole country watched,
Like deer in the headlights,
This hell bending
Whirlwind of power wreaking destruction,
With disbelief, and spellbound awe.
Oh, Katrina your wrath has come to me
My home's in Louisiana
And now it's out to sea
Although this could have been averted
With ongoing improvements
To the levees and canals,
A pronounced lack of response,
Was spawned of a knowledge
That the natural protective barriers,
The islands, swamps and forests,
Were sold off little by little
Until New Orleans was like a teacup
Imbedded in the seashore.
A sitting duck
For the first good wave to come along
And fill it up.
And Washington looked the other way.
It had other agendas,
And higher priorities,
Like the pursuit of foreign oil,
And shoving this voodoo doll of democracy
Down the throats of
Of the unwilling…
This general indifference to natural order–
Like where was the EPA
During the years it took developers
To decimate the marshlands?
You watered your bureaucracies down with nepotism,
Cronyism and the well connected.
With a rising array of tasty perks
Enjoyed in the face
Of a fragmented economic environment
Laden with wanting consumers
Scrambling for service work
Carving a penny from a nickel
‘Carry their suitcase, change their sheets, park their car'
“Thank you, sir”
People so poor that they can't seek welfare
Because they have no identification
But they add contrast to the
Another species that emerged from the swamp
Government goons in their gray, gaunt faces
Lunch-pork stains on your shirt
Guilty, greasy little deeds –
Two tickets to Cancun;
A healthy envelope in your pocket,
Oh, Katrina your wrath has come to me
My home's in Louisiana
And now it's out to sea
Meanwhile….quiet deliberation,
They slip beneath the night
German cars and limousines
Valet parked
5 star treatment,
A Thousand dollars a plate,
Black tie, invitation only
The ‘Beautiful people',
Their faces glowing with money
The buzz is bayou development
“The new trillion dollar industry”,
The same noise you hear
In every town, these days.
The game is monopoly.
The future is in the reclaiming of the swamps.
Tonight's theme,
“Nature is a woman
And she must bend to Man's desire”…
She can be raped and ravaged
And sold to prostitution
And “Ladies and Gentlemen,
With a small investment,
You can be her pimp”.
Let her pleasing ass rise up from the swamps with,
Neighborhoods, roads and schools,
Happy soccer moms and dads that work for companies
That pump the swamp and build the homes
And pave the roads,
And teach in the schools
--And make the children,
On a hot night in the bayou,
With that delicious little thing from LSU
With her straw blond hair and perky tits
The back seat of a BMW
Borrowed from a dad
Whose key to success
Was his ability to get the government
To hand over land to developers
Whose purpose is to make money creating
The stuff dreams are made of,
For people who want water front property,
Crawfish and oysters,
Riverboat rides, Marty Gras,
And glorious sunsets…
To harvest the fruit of the labor
Of the money that had worked so hard,
Buying the stock in the oil companies
Whose off shore drilling stations,
Refineries and pipelines,
Dot the gulf horizon,
The dirty ions of their hydrocarbonic emissions
Dancing with the setting sun,
Bending its long rays
And blocking its short ones,
Spewing reds, oranges and purples
Into the twilit sky,
A star spangled testament
To the American Dream
Oh, Katrina your wrath has come to me
My home's in Louisiana
And now it's out to sea
The message is clear,
Protect your own and plan for the worst,
It will cost you more in the long run to ignore this,
It will cost us all more
To keep supporting a regime of self interest
Whose fixation on fossil fuel
Land acquisition and increasing their margins
Is predicated on slavery
And a blatant disregard to nature.
The irony of hurricane Katrina
Attacking our oil refining production
Should be clear enough.
We have become so blinded by
What we take for granted,
We can't conceive that there might be
A better way to propel our horseless carriages,
Metal birds and iron fish.
The real ones all drink water.
Maybe that's a hint.
The real ones all eat food,
Not the sap from multi million year old dead bodies.
The real ones all need sunlight.
Oil never need see the light of day
From it's home in the ground to your gas tank
It hides in darkness.
Only its gaseous emissions,
Will find the sun
And seek out a new home
In Earth's stratosphere,
Where they will cover the planet,
Trapping the heat below.
Warming the oceans
Encouraging more violent hurricanes,
Tornadoes and super storms
To further cripple
A starving and freezing
Mankind, so dependent
On the black gold
We can't see the relentless
Free energy all around us.
Wind and rain
And millions of lightning volts of electricity,
A perpetual nuclear furnace in our sun
A massive hydraulic pump in the moon
An endlessly burning coal at our Earth's center.
The most volatile gas of all – oxygen,
As abundant as our rain forests could be,
Nitrogen (what bombs are made from),
Methane a by-product of life…
Oh, Katrina your wrath has come to me
My home's in Louisiana
And now it's out to sea
When did intelligence die?
Did it quietly pass one night
When we were dreaming?
When did common sense
Slip into the disappearing
Wake of life?
A trail so littered with debris
That it chokes all that follow
Poisoning the future
With the synthetic atomic junk
Of a plastic world.
Why do we scorn a loving mother,
And worship an absent father?
Our psychology is the blind leading the blind
Homo sapiens,
A pathetic representative of a planet
Whose time has come
To reach out to her stellar neighbors.
How will we ever understand them,
When we don't even understand ourselves?
Thinking inside an increasingly smaller box.
Spiking our pleasure,
Dulling our pain,
Running the industrial treadmill.
Cheating each other for gain.
Who gets the biggest share?
Until it's all used up,
Then, as the increasing hurricanes and super storms
Begin to separate us from our
Power and food sources,
Our Military, medical and government services gone,
We'll loot and kill and band for survival.
We will dine on each other.
Language will disintegrate.
Love and hope
Reduced to hunger and desire.
And Gaia will softly close her arms around us
And take us back into her womb
And there we will stay, timeless
As crystal memories.
And in time she will reflect
And plot a new course.
Conceiving a new idea
That someday will give birth
To a truer and better version
Of the Son of God
Oh, Katrina your wrath has come to me
My home's in Louisiana
And now it's out to sea
