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Desert Dancefloor

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  Desert Dancefloor This morning I sit alone, watching the pulse of the desert rise with the sun. A rhythm reveals itself in the creosote, in the sparrows picking through gravel, in the shadows retreating toward the mountains. The earth has its own nightclub. No neon. No last call. Just heat gathering itself for another long set. It reminds me of New Orleans— rain-soaked nights, basslines rolling through my ribs, the dance floor crowded with ghosts wearing the faces of the living. Back then, I danced to outrun myself. Sweat erased the edges of old insecurities. The music made promises it could never keep. I know where the bodies are buried. Not in the literal sense. I mean the dreamers, the lovers, the beautiful wreckage of people who burned too brightly, who mistook the spark for the sun. Some are buried beneath memory. Some beneath regret. Some beneath songs I can no longer hear without stopping. Now the desert is my DJ. The ether spins invisible records. The wind scratches acros...
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Ashes

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  I held your ashes in the desert. Not in a church. Not beneath stained glass. But under a white sun that had spent millions of years teaching stone how to disappear. The box was lighter than memory. I kept turning it over in my hands, trying to understand how thunder becomes dust. You were never dust to me. You arrived like monsoon clouds rolling over a thirsty basin. I craved you the way creosote craves rain— patiently, desperately, with roots reaching into places even I could not see. Your laugh shook loose entire seasons. And your touch— God. Your touch felt like galaxies colliding behind my ribs. Like stars dying and being born at the exact same moment. The universe was never silent when you placed your hand on my skin. Even now, holding what remains, I swear I can hear it. Not your voice. The echo. The afterglow. The sound of light still traveling through darkness long after its source is gone. The desert understood. Wind moved through the ocotillo. A raven crossed the sky. T...
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Vertebrae

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  Found a vertebra in the desert today. White as the moon at noon, chalky against the red earth. Once it held a body upright. Once it moved beneath skin, beneath breath, beneath stars. Now it rests in silence, a small monument to the fierce briefness of things. Fragile, fragile, fragile. The sun presses down. The wind moves through creosote. An ancient ocean sleeps beneath my feet. Even the sand is made of what came before— shell, bone, mountain, memory. Tick, tock. The vertebra waits without concern. It has surrendered the question. What sense are we hoping it all makes? The lizard on the stone does not ask. The raven crossing the empty sky does not ask. The earth keeps turning through beauty and nonsense alike. Someday someone may find my vertebra, bleached beneath this same hard light. I hope what came before it was vivid. Not perfect. Not permanent. Vivid. A life of bright colors left in the rain. Watercolors running together at the edges. A canvas unable to hold the sky. The b...
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the Rain King

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 The sun here is not a star.  It is an instrument.  A blade.  A furnace door left open above the Chihuahuan Desert.  By noon  it has burned through every excuse. Every costume.  Every carefully rehearsed lie.  The heat strips this world to its skeleton.  It sterilizes. Purifies.  Reduces.  Until everything stands exposed in the harsh honesty of pure light.  The mesquite.  The mountains.  The man.  Nothing escapes.  The sun demands the truth. And it is patient.  Year after year it bleaches bone white.  Turns wood into driftwood.  Memory to dust.  Leaves skulls gleaming among the landscape . Like relics from an extinct religion.  Hollow.  White. Sacred.  As if holiness were simply  what remains  after false has burned past marrow.  Above me,  the sky is oceanic.  Impossibly blue.  So deep it feels swimmable.  As if I could dive upward  ...
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Fever Dream

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  The heat gathers slowly here, not as an assault but as a presence— a warm, dry wind moving through creosote and mesquite, changing the energy like a sentinel taking its post at the edge of the day. Morning arrives turquoise, impossibly clean, the sky stretched wide above tan sand and distant mountains softened by light. The world still feels new to me, like a fever dream I haven't fully awakened from, every shape outlined with significance, every silence carrying weight. By noon, the desert has stripped itself bare. White bones lie bleaching in the sun, small monuments to surrender. Nothing is hidden. Nothing is wasted. Everything unnecessary burns away. The heat knows how to do this. It takes and takes until only truth remains. What you do with that truth is your own destiny. Sometimes I think of Georgia O'Keeffe— sepia-toned memories of a woman living her best life beneath these same skies, finding cathedrals in stone, finding eternity in bone and shadow, finding herself in...
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Breathe

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  Morning comes softly to Alamogordo. The Sacramento Mountains emerge from sleep one shadow at a time, their ridges gathering light like old memories returning to the body. A thrasher splashes in the bird bath. Water lifts. Water falls. The sound is small enough to be mistaken for a prayer. The desert says nothing. Creosote. Dust. Stone. The long language of things that survive. I stand among ghosts I once called myself. The child who dreamed of elsewhere. The man who carried too much. The lives that fit for a season and then loosened, slipping away like old skin. The earth keeps them all. Every day I walk in a quiet funeral. No black clothes. No hymns. Only sunlight moving across gravel. Only wind lifting the corners of memory. Only the endless procession of what has ended making room for what has not yet begun. The mountains brighten. The thrasher climbs from the water and vanishes into the mesquite. Nothing announces itself. Still, something is happening. The wind moves through ...
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