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The Chris Chandler Show

  • Chandler films about New Orleans

    9th Ward New Orleans #1

    9th ward, New Orleans
    chandler
    august 95

    ninth ward, New Orleans
    with her hollow eyed men
    mumbling on midday benches, clinging to warm budweiser
    her sunken sidewalks
    and broken ice-cream trucks
    her rusting bicycles that gallop reckless past bars on windows, dingy neon, and empty clothes lines
    children barefoot  
    women pregnant
    you are alive

    ninth ward, New Orleans
    with her tattooed boys
    banging out chaos on drunken gas tanks
    and electric scrap metal lies empty in vacant lots
    where all music is experimental
    all experiments have no control
    and no one wanders why nothing is rendered on canvases made of
    topless girls
    that spin madness into beauty
    you are alive

    ninth ward, New Orleans
    with her shotgun doorways
    that open into tiny bars
    filled with sweat and Miller High Life
    Styrofoam plates of silver dollar sausage, red beans and plastic forks
    barstools dismembered
    concave linoleum
    and living legends that blow tributes to departed trumpets
    until hollow eyed men reverberate anew
    you are alive

    ninth ward, New Orleans
    with her thick air, and parched water
    her passionate pavement blisters the soul-less
    and shoeless black boys ask questions to total strangers
    where everybody has a hustle
    every hustle has an audience
    and no one really says "Good Morning America, How are you?"
    where all movement is slow
    her exhausted streetcars still stammer out forgotten desire
    for:



    ninth ward, New Orleans
    you are alive.
    your sunken sidewalks bloom with prolific purple - invasive beauty buds through your angry concrete - cracking foundations.
    your topless girls pierce the body of  night  with jumbled tattoos - radiant in the mercury vapor twilight
    your shoeless black boys tap dance beyond the double-barreled despondent
    your affluent trumpets hail Gabrielle to come down from his shotgun shack and breath new life into a bored bacchanal.
    Desire Street is found, and You Ninth ward, are alive