The Hot Lines: Butterfly by Carlos Andres Gomez

Real estate developers are the natural disasters
what defense contractors are to terrorist attacks.
Both like it quiet and well planned.

Maybe find a soft coffin bed for an only son to rest in.
A used trailer for a family of five to struggle to stay alive in.
An entire religion or region for the public to invest their hate in.

Draped in thick rhetoric that tastes like ash and jet fuel on this tongue when I try to speak.

How does a villager in southern Thailand
prove his family has been living on a plot of land for five centuries
when he’s never needed a deed to come home?

When his great grandmother taught him how to weave bamboo
but he has no photographs to prove it.

When Club Med vacations are waiting to be planned
All those post-tsunami package deals on go-puct.com.
Swollen blood on the new foundations of new hotels.

Renovated

multi-level housing. Multi-million dollar brownstones in Brooklyn. Brokers
racking their brains for the next hip catch phrase,

We won’t call it Bedstey anymore.
Let’s call it…“Stivenson Highs”
or “Bedford Village”
or that place where you can take a Biggie Smalls hood-tour.

Not the lower ninth ward
but Andrew Jackson’s Lower Ninth Ward Estates.

Kick the tenants out and build condos.
Put in a police complex across the street like Cabrini-Green, Chicago.

Near the seventeen street canal in lower Mississippi, homeless mass stream down the bayou. The insurance companies don’t even bother with their typical flimsy alibis
now.

Just refusing the answer any phone calls.
Official statement:
Try to find a trailer for now.

We’ll get to you when we get to your paperwork.

They don’t have effective disaster protocol.
But they’ve got intricate stalling procedures and able accountants.
Practice erasing families like pencil markings.

Turn their stories into bond-fires like heaps of burnt books in Berlin.

An illiterate grandmother
in a wheelchair on top of her roof: dead

Left out in the sun
To be rescued by someone.
Her pained expression almost confused for a smile.

Slavery should have prepared them for this, I guess.

Should have known better then to ask for help when all they were brought here for was to be help.

Because land is worth more then we are.
Natural resources and beachfront property worth more then well-earned wrinkles and baby teeth so ocean liners are beached in Madagascar, excess oil and domestic sewage dumped under the last perfect sand and mangrove swamp.

The shaman said the devil put it there.

83 people abruptly buried after a street kid in Rio brought a shiny piece of metal he found in a hospital dumpster back to his village. Low income housing built on land recently cleared of toxic waste. Watts deemed safe for California immigrants.

An infant
staring at her mother’s abnormal growth before bedtime in Chernobyl
wondering what happened
to her arms.

___________

I first met Carlos in the fall of 2001. We were both University of Penn undergrads at the time and were involved in a campus tutoring program. I remmber in that first meeting a feeling of instant familarity, but ultimately I can’t really trust it. Truth is, Carlos is a inspriation to just about everyone the moment you meet. He is one of those people who’s presence fills the room. Without him, this blog would never had existed.

I heard this piece just yesterday on Carlos’ myspace site and was instantly moved. I had a conversation with a young jewish medical student who relocated to New Orleans who, though not really knowing where to stand, was clearly disturbed by the landgrabs and blantent disregard for human dignity that has and continues to occur on areas devistated by Katrina. People’s homes being demololished without their approval, the increible hurtles citzens are put through just to get back on their feet again, the totally lack of any empathy to their position, the anger at even suggesting that they should be helped. This young well-off jewish medical student told me these things, was clearly touched somehow and yet, through it all, made every effort to justify and overlook and block out what was happening all the while. And she was a good person.

The compacity of people to harden their heart so much for reasons they cannot even articulate really startles me. I think Butterfly captures this fustration and it’s bare, ugly source quite well. Preach bra. Preach.