Stands the Human Being
Stands the Human Being
Platform-Rigs check the Gulf in Fields of Blocks / [...] / "Man, I was too hot to think!"
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Platform-Rigs check the Gulf in Fields of Blocks / [...] / "Man, I was too hot to think!"

Recorded with DPRAM (ROGER LEWIS, KIRK JOSEPH, DON VAPPIE and ALEXEY MARTI) and our guests ANDRE MICHOT and LOUIS MICHOT in the Dockside Studio of Milton, Louisiana and with JUSTIN TOCKET as our Engineer, July 31, 2024.

Colors Changing Color, Part 2

Platform-rigs check the Gulf
In Fields of Blocks, 
Always lighted,
Plumes of flame flaring gas.
Come May, Cajuns can shrimp
Past three miles offshore.
Be’foh, “Coon-asses” hunt frogs,
Trap muskrats and nutria.
Once’t, a man could make big money, 
Doing that, the Captain of one Tugboat said.

Southwest, along Highway 90,
Beside the Intracoastal Waterway, 
Thousands park in yards of Companies’ 
Building Ships and Rigs, Platforms 
On their sides with legs consecutively canted
Like dark steel spars of fantastic Armada! 
Cranes hoist pipe and cement,
Marine toilets and heaps of rusty scrap. 
Oyster shells serve like gravel
On shoulders of roads flat as your belt.
The Live Oak grows out of supple and still fertile earth.

Farther south, by old Jean Lafitte’s hideaway,
Land-Rigs drilling beside rows of broken-stalked
Cane and Sugar and Sulfur Refineries
Contrast more with fishing-people’s sleek new boats.

While—from itty-bitty Kaplan
To New Orleans’ broad Canal—
The same kind of come-quick thing—
Neon gauds for Burger King et al—sticks,
To me like a wrecker’s ball,
Burst ands hanging, through one chaste white wall 
Of a former Hotel’s Court along Royale (1974)

These things, put on,
Don’t really belong,
You’ll hear, but the money’s
Good, and almost any man can make it.

The weather, too--ah, it shifts quick. 
Out of Lounges tempers loosed
Going to Cut and Shoot,
Trans-Ams flipping on tract-house lawns. 
Trucks and happy Pennants sinking under Bridges.
Their decals and ruffles pretty as girls,
Soaking blood.  "Man, I was too hot to think.”





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