Shine on, you crazy diamond.

Down at the end of old Bourbon Street is a place you're not supposed to go, where everybody's been. The locals will swear you away from the area before making you promise to visit.

Isolated just a bit from the noise and the neon is the lingering point to an exclamation,

is the spent ash at the end of a burning cigarette.

Past the hand grenades and hurricanes and Kentucky sorority girls lies a little speck of darkness.

Sits a little den of contradiction. 

Where they're shouting in frenzy to wire and ivory and bachelor parties have moments of sincerity. Where sleeping songs by Mr. Waits get resurrected once the patrons and piano 

have been drinking.

Leave "Sweet Caroline" and the grenadine to Pat O'Brien's; we're drinking whiskey and

calling out for Young rather than Diamond. 

Trying to avoid seeing our faces in those of the worn elders while we're glancing at tattooed ivy snaking around arms, 

past breast implants, and into toffee hair.

For longer than we've been a nation, these walls have been seeping alcohol into conversation.
The oldest bar in America. Hideout to the pirate Lafitte, 

and lesser criminals along the way.

You can visit in daylight. 
All sunshine and discordance. 
The tourist horsecarts will stop out front and a waiter will run out to drop off a voodoo daiquiri while you snap a photo with your iPhone and post it to Facebook. The bartender, 
with her ivy arms, 
will make your daughter fruit juice and call it a virgin hurricane.
But the piano will be silent,
and the 
corners will be bare. 
Or you can come by night. When the girls are lighting 
cigarettes off candles, 
when the boys are warning 
that's bad luck for sailors. 
Shoes settling into brick canoed down by the centuries of impatience, and boredom, and 
insecurities, 
and determination renewed 
by spirits.

When the years feel palpable. In the bar and the drinkers and the sing-a-long psalms.  When the line "Old man, look my life. I'm a lot like you were" finds its proper mark. They'll tell you it's haunted and it has to be true. 

In this city 

we keep coughing up ghosts.

They fill the wood

and the brick

and the off-key shouts, the claps in missed tempo.

And here at the end of old Bourbon Street,

we'll keep coming.

Past the hurricanes,

and the hand grenades,

and the sorority girls borrowed from wherever,

We'll know we always have a place to visit.

A hideout.

 Somewhere to
die by the minute.
Drawn forward to the darkness, we
martyrs to filthier causes.