Come With Me, Darlin’, Down To New Orleans
By: Erik Rittenberry
Tags: New Orleans, Travel Writing, Adventure, Poetry

Look at you darlin’, you’re worn out,

pushed and pulled this way and that,

numbed by the screen in the maddening

cubicle of a tethered life.

You’re tired of the limp conversations

with your half-baked generation.

Seems they’re bringing you down,

darlin’, so low that you can’t feel

the flow of your own blood

gushing around.

Your days are rushed and

mechanical. The algorithms

of the daily grind have

you all figured out. You’re

losing that fire, darlin’,

that sense of being madly alive.

I can see it in your exotic eyes,

the way you move, the way

you talk, the way you sigh

when the alarm clock cries

in the early AM.

I know a place that’ll help shake you out of it.

It’s a peculiar place for the exiled, for those

who crave a different taste than the stale

monotony of the typical American life.

We’re gonna descend on down to

a place of poets, and villains,

vagabonds, assassins, and gamblers,

drunkards, artists, pirates,

prophets, and midnight amblers.

A place where voodoo queens

meander through Cities of the Dead

and damaged souls lurk within

dreamy dreams with dirty toes

stumbling down steamy streets.

It’s a vile place, darlin’– grimy

and dangerous but alive, and through

the thick fog of its impurity there’s a light,

a gleaming light

that guides our yearning souls

out of the dreadful night.

It’s the Crescent City darlin’,

that muddy mystical metropolis

that washed up on a sharp bend

at the lower end

of the mighty Mississippi

some centuries ago.

A place of broken levees and rising waters,

slow boats and creole ghosts sitting

on front stoops of Bywater shacks

with toothless smiles and shirtless backs.

The sidewalks in this town ooze secrets

of centuries past, and the buildings are filled

with the wisdom of ancient pacts.

It’s here that a breeze like a bum’s

liquored breath hits you with all

its sins and mysteries

as you walk with barefoot gypsies

along the banks of the Mississippi.

It’s here darlin’, that a young whiskey drunk

Faulkner

typed away at his poems down in Pirate’s Alley.

And it’s here where the beer drunk poet

Bukowski

visited and stayed in rat-infested rooms

as he hid from life. It’s a place of

Tennessee Williams

and his Streetcar named Desire. It’s here where

you can hear the trumpet of

Satchmo

seep out of the mud in the early hours

as dew drips from blooming Magnolias.

It’s also in this dirty ole’ town that

Dean Moriarty

bellowed out ‘Oh, smell the people!’…

‘Ah! God! Life!’ ‘Yes!’

as he darted from the car and looked in

every direction for girls.

‘Look at her!’…

“The air was so sweet in New Orleans,”

Kerouac wrote, “it seemed to come in

soft bandannas;

and you could smell the river and

really smell the people,

and mud, and molasses, and every kind

of tropical exhalation with your nose

suddenly removed from the dry ices

of a Northern winter.”

So come with me, darlin’

come with me down

to the land of sugar cane

where we’ll drown out the mundane

as the storm clouds float in

from over Lake Pontchartrain

and we’ll dance in the pouring rain

with our battered boots

as we slide ever so

gloriously

down the drain

of life.

Hand in hand we’ll wander

alongside ancient sepulchers

in the flooded graveyards

while the ravens

flutter in the gray gloom.

And when the sun finally peaks

out from the muck,

we’ll be wondrously drunk

on Decatur Street as whiffs

of jasmine drift thru the debauchery.

Can’t you hear Tom Waits singin’ to us,

darlin’,

listen, listen… you can hear the piano…

now…there it is — his smoke scarred voice

cries out:

“Well, I wish I was in New Orleans,

I can see it in my dreams,

Arm-in-arm down Burgundy,

a bottle and my friends and me.”

C’mon darlin’,

we only have one life to live

and we have to live it wild;

get scarred up and wounded

by those fleeting miles

so we can greet the grave with style.

So pack a bag, lemme see that smile,

there you go, it’s time to

dim that halo, sweet child,

and defile

them pretty

little

wings.

C’mon darlin’,

the end is near.

It always is.