Words of Acadiana

  In the swamp, the air was heavy with memory— water thick as sorrow, roots tangled like the mind of a man who has forgotten what light feels like. He wandered, half spirit, half wound, drifting through cypress shadows that whispered his name without mercy. Every step was a prayer he didn’t believe in. But the desert called— not with words, but with silence so vast it swallowed his doubt whole. The wind stripped him bare, peeled away the moss and grief until only bone and breath remained. The sun burned through his illusions and found a glimmer beneath— a spark that still remembered flight. When the dust rose in spirals, he followed it upward, skin to feather, heart to horizon. The hawk that broke from his chest was not an escape but a return— to clarity, to spirit, to the endless communion of sky. Now he circles with the cloud spirits, where the swamp’s sorrow cannot reach, where the desert wind hums forgiveness, and the lost man is lost no longer.

The sun carves you in half, one side claimed by fire, the other by shadow. Your eyes tilt upward, as if searching for a sign etched in the sky, as if the desert itself might speak through the silence. The turquoise on your chest glows like water long vanished, a prayer against thirst, a relic of memory’s river. You are not still— you are listening, to the slow turning of stone, to the whisper of ancestors who move in the heat shimmer between worlds. In this moment you are both shadow and flame, a sentinel of what endures.  

You hold the vessel as though it breathes, as though the clay remembers the hands that first shaped it, their palms red with earth, their songs rising into the desert dusk. The cross carved into its skin is more than a mark— it is a map, a wound, a compass pointing inward to the silence between worlds. Your eyes carry the same weight— hazel storms, haunted not by what they see but by what they cannot forget. The turquoise on your hands does not glitter, it hums, a low sound like water buried beneath centuries of sand. In this moment you are not just a man. You are the keeper of fragments, the living archive of longing, a bridge between dust and breath. And the vessel— it is not empty. It holds the echoes of ancestors, and perhaps, a shadow of yourself.  

  He raises his arms to the desert light, robes spilling with the colors of old earth, and on the wall behind him a greater figure rises— the shadow of a chief, an ancestor summoned, a sentinel of silence. The air thickens. Every breath carries the dust of the dead. Every drop of sweat slides from his brow like a bead from a rosary, a prayer falling to rectify a painful past. The shadow does not threaten. It guides— leading his thoughts toward the horizon, toward the endless desert where forgiveness waits like a hidden spring. He forgives, though the wound still glows. He forgives, though the ghosts still walk beside him. And still, he chooses to remain apart— alone with the desert, alone with the sentinel in his shadow, alone with the quiet ache that binds him to the ancestors. This is his pilgrimage: not to return, not to belong, but to walk forward carrying both the dust of forgiveness and the solitude he refuses to release.

  The desert does not forgive, but it remembers. Beneath its skin, his ancestors wait— bones pressed into dust, names swallowed by wind. He lights a cigarette, draws them in, each breath an altar flame, each exhale a release into the ether. The smoke hangs in the air like marigold petals scattered on Día de los Muertos— bright offerings in a land that has forgotten color. Sweat runs down his brow, a rosary of salt, each bead a prayer to the ones who came before. No candles, no sugar skulls, no music of remembrance— only the desert’s vast silence, and the grit of a man who chooses loneliness as communion. He will not leave the ghosts behind. He forgives the past, but not enough to let it go. Here, where the living rarely linger, he walks with the dead and calls it a pilgrimage. The desert becomes his altar, the smoke his incense, his footsteps the prayer.

 Built it on bones  The altar of us  Hollow, holy  Sacred, secret  Your breath an incense  Rising through my cracked ribs  You were no god  But I knelt anyway  Mouth full of ache and ash  Love, you said,  Is devotion in flames  Your body trembled  With gospel and guilt  Fingertips tracing words of love on my spine  Each vertebrae a vow  You never meant to keep  We worshipped in motel rooms  Under buzzing neon lights  Sanctified lust among the muck  Smoke rising  Our words cracked by thunder  I sang hymns in moans  Unanswered, unbeautiful  As purple lightning lit up our sky  Rain to wash it all clean  There were moments of miracles  Your smile in the morning light  A crescent moon on your collarbone in the glow of the dark But even miracles don’t matter  When worship turns to war  I extinguished the altar we lit  To find my way again i...

  I slipped through your garden gate   Barefoot, breathy  Draped in the hush of midnight blooms  He was waiting  A wolf in the wisteria  August clung to my neck like fever  Humid, sticky  My body was a matchstick  Struck by his words Igniting our fever dream  His hands, apostate prayers  Landing on the cathedral of my skin  We were secret as sin  Reciting vows into the midnight air  As roses bit their tongues  Aware that it was all temporary  I wore desire like a bruise  Purple, proud  The garden knew  Even the iron gate rusted  With the salt of our shame  He loved me cruelly  Like a dare  Like salt in a chalice  Every kiss, a gate closing Yet still I waited  The gate stayed open all summer  Until no one returned  Only the wind, tearing petals from the blooms Like pages from my ribs  An ill-fated chapter  Seasons shifted Summer was over  A...

  You arrived like sea glass. Sun-warmed and sharp-edged. Washed into my hands by some careless tide. Fate. I mistook glint for gospel. Your laugh for shelter. August peeled me open. Days dripped like honey, long and slow with amber energy. I drank each one as if you'd stay-as if summer ever could. I tried to hold on as it slipped away like a bottle of wine. Your lips never said forever, but your eyes did. I pressed my hope into the crook of your neck, soft as a prayer that feared its own echo. Our love ended but I still hear the echoes. Distant voices from the shore as I'm bobbing in the sea. We lived between the summer tides. Blankets on borrowed sand. Your shirt on my skin like a broken promise I kept wearing long after it cooled. August faded into September. A summer I'll forever remember.

  Standing beneath a blanket of stars   Naked  Vulnerable  Exposed  The shower rains down on me  Baptized by the water  Serenaded by the wind  There’s magic in the desert  Beauty in the darkness  A comfort in the night  Never felt more alive  As the last evidence of you  Swirls down the drain  It’s fulfilling  Watching it disappear  Guess I had to come all the way out here  To rid myself of you  Sacred freedom  Creating a path for what shall be  From the rubble of what was  I stand beneath this cascade  A relic and rising star at once  Coexisting 

  A skeleton of stars   Strewn across the desert night sky A streak of memory of what once was  Stardust Remnants of lives lived before  There’s no perfect crime We all do the time Until it undoes us in the end  Alone in the graveyard of our own creation 

 Sitting here at this table  My cigarette burning to ash  As it hangs from my lips like hope  About to fall into oblivion  Aces up my sleeve  Not wanting to believe  You thought I’d come crawling back to you  But I saunter in with a firmness  That could crumble mountains to dust  A tectonic shift in energies  A real reversal of fortune  These games with you just ain’t it  They’re the reason my heart has to run  Like a frightened horse  Thundering in the opposite direction  So simmer down  And pucker up  It’s bound to sting  Buttercup  This leaving a love that can’t sustain  This walking away before the pain  Treading against a lonely earth  In search of the next new me  As the wind blows life back into my lungs  I’m struck by a glittering cloud of dust  Choking away my human remains  Tip my hat to it  I’ll skip the wake  Burial leads to rebirth...

 And I stand on my hill  Embattled  Distressed as my jeans  From crawling across this arid earth  Begging for love  Longing for acceptance  ‘Til it struck me  Under this desert sun  That I hold the power with my faith  To overcome  These desert valleys echo my screams  Shattering limestone with my intentions  I rise again  Slowly at first  Shaky wings  Healing can feel like hell  Eventually I ascend above the hurt  My view, heavenly  Put my past to rest  A funeral for who I had to be  I have a ministry I was born for  My destiny written in the brail of these night stars  West Texas under my feet  A song in my soul  To Overcome 

 Your ghost keeps me up at night  Smokes in my room  I smell it  That olfactory trigger  Memories develop like Polaroids  Moments frozen in time  Like smiles on celluloid  Black and white dreams  Laughter echoes my empty room  I fell for the hologram that was your love  Vanished as quickly as it came  So I strike up a match  Invite that ghost to hang a while  Perhaps he will tell me things  You were not evolved enough to say  Smoking with ghosts  Exhaling my grief  Rising from the ashes  That have fallen to the floor 

 My eyes gaze  At a sinking desert sun  The light is blinding  So pure  My heart is filled with love and longing  In equal measure  The love of you lingers  The longing moves in so quickly  An aching takes residence  In your absence  Dry earth  Then the flood  Moods shifting like the weather  A desert is like love  Rewarding and punishing simultaneously  I wander this desert of my own making  Screaming to the skies above  To bring me your love  To let it fall down upon me  My life force  I wear your embrace like a bruise  Slow to fade after the moment has expired  Things that don’t mean shit to you  Swallow my entire existence  You carved your name into my heart  Now I need you to lick the scar  Make your way back to me  This desert is meant for two  One just doesn’t do  These dark necessities are feeding on me  C’mon reach for my han...

Coffee in my glass Horses in my dreams  Equine energy  In waves like the sea  I was born of the desert  Hell and high water  I’ve crawled across dry earth  Scaled my mountains of hurt  To bring to you this version  Searching for requited love  It’s there for your taking  Should you so choose  Mud and Sun formed me  To fall in love with you  Piss and vinegar mask my tender heart  Your face is my shelter  This love, my truest art  So come on and love me  My silly boy  Make it all feel worthwhile  Come on and love me  My blue eyed boy  Make me hang around for a while.   

 Sometimes in the healing process, you have to cut ties. It’s wonderful how things well up inside of us when we are ready to confront the work.