Words of Acadiana

  At the crossroads where the desert splits itself like a wound, I sat.  I found a dive bar flickering under  neon bones of red and blue , a last-chance lantern for the lost. Inside,  country music bled slow from a cracked jukebox, steel guitar crying like a ghost that still remembered my name. Cigarette smoke curled into grey serpents above the bar, hissing secrets only the midnight and the damned could decipher. I drank  whiskey-bent lies straight from the bottle— truth tasted too clean for a night like this. The bartender’s eyes were moons of their own, half-lit, half-shadowed, seeing more than he ever dared speak aloud. Outside, the  full moon  hung heavy, round as an omen, bright as a spell, pulling at the sand, the blood, at every crossroads choice I’d buried under years of wandering. A gust rose from the west— warm, wicked, whispering— and I felt the desert stir, a witch’s hand brushing my spine , reminding me that magic lives in moments like th...

  Cursed & Cured Out in the desert where the witches dwell, I found my name carved in a drought-bleached bone— a curse whispered under a neon sign flickering like a dying prayer above a dead-end bar. Whiskey burned its truth into my tongue, country music bleeding from the jukebox like a wound that never learned to heal. Unrequited love sat beside me, boot heels kicked up, acting like he owned the night. Ghosts drifted between the cacti, soft as the sigh of a past life; they knew my story, how I’d worn my boots thin chasing someone who couldn’t turn toward me no matter how bright I burned. But the witches circled back at dawn, their shawls catching the bourbon-colored light, their voices a low rattle of mercy. They crushed mesquite leaves, mixed them with dust and moonwater, and painted a sigil on my chest— half curse, half cure, all truth. When the spell settled into my ribs, I felt the desert’s pulse replace my own. It didn’t promise love, only clarity. Only survival. Only the...

  I feel right here— lit up in my own ruin above a dead-end street where West Texas forgets its name and the night comes down heavy, black as a shut eye. My neon spine crackles, a wounded halo flickering over gravel and broken glass. I buzz like a prophecy that no one ever wanted— calling in the lonely, the hunted, the ones who bleed their truths only when the whiskey starts to drag open their ribs. Inside, country music twangs with a desperate tremor, a steel guitar bent like a witch’s hand curling around the heart. The floorboards remember everything— every confession whispered on the ballroom floor, knees bruised, souls cracked open under the weight of wanting too much. The air is soaked in whiskey breath and old sins warming in the dark. I glow for them— all those tired spirits trying to outrun their shadows, trying to dance their way back into their own bodies. And though the night is thick with ghosts that never learned to leave, I hold steady, casting red light like a spell ...

  Love Letter to the Disco Era Mirrors multiply the life I’ve lived— Confessions spin, the night forgives. Silk, fur, and rhythm collide— The Disco Era never died. Dear Disco, You are more than a genre, more than a decade caught between revolution and excess—you are resurrection. In the strobe-lit temples of your worship, we learned to become infinite. Sequins and sweat mingled like holy water as bodies surrendered to the beat, each pulse a promise that the night would hold us, heal us, forgive us. Under mirrored ceilings, we were a thousand selves reflected back, refracted into light. You were freedom in motion—heels clicking against linoleum altars, hips swaying to liberation’s heartbeat. The world outside might have been cruel, divided, hungry for conformity, but inside your glittering sanctuaries, we built galaxies out of desire and defiance. The bass was prophecy. The synths were spells. Every song was a chance to be reborn, if only until dawn. Even now, your pulse hums beneat...

  Missing the desert is like missing a limb. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget—the weight of the sun on your shoulders, the dry whisper of wind that coats your skin in dust so fine it feels like memory itself. Even after you leave, the desert lingers. It clings to your pores, to the corners of your mind, to the ache behind your ribs that flares like phantom pain when the air grows too damp, too full of noise. There is a silence in the desert that becomes a part of you. It moves beneath your skin, a pulse that syncs with the stillness of distant mesas and the soft hum of power lines vibrating under a wide, indifferent sky. When you’re gone, the absence hums louder than the place ever did. It’s a ghost—warm and hollow at once. Only the lonely understand this kind of missing. The kind that has no face, no end. The desert was never meant to love you back, yet you crave its cold nights and cruel light, the way it stripped you bare until you were nothing but nerve and dust...

  “Motel 6, Alamogordo” The super moon is swollen tonight— a silver heart beating above the gypsum dunes, casting milklight on the parking lot where moths tremble against the neon vacancy sign. In Room 112, the tub fills slow, water whispering like a secret I once told the stars. Tequila hums soft beneath my ribs, a low electric murmur— heat loosening the borders between body and sky. The desert breathes through the thin motel curtains, cool and mineral, carrying the sound of trains, coyotes, and some ancient song older than prayer. I close my eyes and drift. The tile floor hums with portals— tiny vortexes opening beneath my skin, memories slipping through the cracks of time. Somewhere, I’m barefoot on white sand, calling out to no one. Somewhere, the moon answers back in a voice that tastes like salt and smoke. I am the siren of this roadside night, singing to the Western wind— half love, half haunting. Every mile I’ve ever driven echoes in the hollow of my chest. And the moon—my ...

  A Farewell Spell for Marfa There’s a certain kind of dusk that only belongs to Marfa—the kind where the light bleeds slow, like a wound refusing to close. Dust rises from the road in amber halos, and the air hums with that strange, invisible electricity that’s neither joy nor sorrow, but something in between. Out here, endings don’t announce themselves; they just drift in on the wind, quiet as tumbleweed shadows. The desert feels hollow tonight. The motel signs buzz faintly, the horizon wears its bruise of burnt pink and violet, and the ghosts of all my former selves wander the edges of town, whispering promises they couldn’t keep. Even the wind sounds different—less like a song, more like a sigh. Marfa was once a kind of spell for me. The wide, merciless sky taught me surrender. The desert dust buried my noise, my need to belong. There were nights when I swore I could feel the old witches stirring under the mesquite—old souls who taught me that solitude is its own kind of prayer...

  Bathwater Blues (Amarillo Motel 6)   🎵 (Verse 1) Neon hums like a lullaby outside the door, Yellow light flickers, paint peeling from the floor. I pour the tap slow, watch the steam start to rise, Cigarette in my lips, mascara in my eyes. The TV’s playin’ some old western sin, James Dean ghosts in the bathtub grin. I slide beneath the water, it’s holy and cheap, The kind of salvation motel dreams keep. (Chorus) Got the best damn bath in the Amarillo Motel 6, Red wine in a paper cup, call it my fix. Radio static hums like a hymn through the wall, And I swear I heard heaven in the bathroom stall. (Verse 2) My hair floats like halos, perfume and regret, Texas moon hangin’ low, ain’t forgiven me yet. There’s lipstick stains on the Bible, tears in my gin, A cross on my wrist where redemption begins. Old towel like velvet, soft as sin, If this is the end, I’d do it again. Cheap soap, divine light, a bruise on my thigh, A love song for no one, but I still sigh. (Chorus) Got the be...

There is a soul born of the swamp — heavy with humidity, veiled in cypress shade, its breath perfumed with decay and jasmine. Its feet are sunk deep into the dark waters of Louisiana, where roots twist like serpents and ghosts hum low songs beneath the surface, where the cypress communicate. The air itself feels ancient here, thick with memory, with love lost and reborn through centuries. It is a place where death feeds life, where everything rots into beauty. And this soul, old and restless, has learned to drink from that decay — to savor the ache of existence like a vampire sips eternity from a lover who must perish.  But its heart… its heart beats for the desert. For the dry kiss of wind on cracked lips. For the holy silence where bones bleach beneath a sun too cruel for lies. It dreams of sand and stone, of mesas that glow blood-red at dusk, of moons so bright they could cut through the body and show the soul inside. The desert calls like a mirage — a place of purification, asc...

  In the heart of southern Louisiana, where the air hangs thick with humidity and memory, an ancient live oak stands. Its trunk is gnarled and swollen, twisted by time and thunder. The bark bears the calligraphy of centuries—etched by storms, carved by hands, scarred by sorrow. Exposed roots coil outward like the ribs of the earth itself, gripping the swamp’s dark belly as if afraid to let go. Spanish moss drapes from the branches, long and silver like the ghosts of forgotten prayers. When the wind sighs through, it stirs them to life—pale, swaying reminders of the nooses that once swung there, heavy with silence and injustice. The tree has seen it all. Two hundred years of dawns rising red over the bayou. Of rain flooding its feet, of children playing beneath its shade, of blood spilled and secrets buried in the mud. It is not merely a tree. It is a witness. A keeper of stories that humans have long tried to forget. When you stand before it, you feel a pulse beneath the bark, a sl...

The rug breathes like an old soul. Woven long ago by a Navajo weaver whose hands spoke in the sacred language of thread, it carries the quiet hum of generations. Its cross pattern—beige as desert bone, black as shadowed mesa, and red as blood steeped in cochineal—forms more than a design. It is a map of memory, a prayer laid flat, a spell caught between warp and weft. Time has touched it gently, then harshly. The once-bright red has faded to a dusky rose, the black softened into charcoal whispers. Dust has settled deep in its fibers, like the ghost of the land itself—ochre sand, volcanic ash, the scent of cedar smoke. The patina is a story written not in ink but in endurance. You can almost hear the murmurs of those who once sat upon it, the creak of wooden floors, the sound of wind moaning through cholla. It feels alive still. When you run your hand over it, you sense pulse and warmth, as if each knot remembers the woman who tied it, the songs she hummed beneath her breath, the sacred...

  Fever Dreams of Far West Texas I live off cigarettes and sadness, each drag a prayer to forgotten gods who sleep beneath the mesas, their dreams scattered like bones bleaching in the open mouth of the sun. The desert hums in burnt umber and terracotta, its light gold and merciless, sliding over flesh until I no longer know where skin ends and the earth begins. Dust rises like breath, a spirit made visible, and I swear it knows my name. Smoke curls from my lips— incense for ghosts that still linger, whispering through the ocotillo and sage. They speak in fevered winds, in the hiss of sand against my boots, in the ache between thunderclaps. Ravens carve dark geometry into the sky, their shadows falling across my face like blessings or warnings. They remember what I’ve forgotten— the sacred hunger of solitude, the soft hum of madness that comes from listening too long to the desert’s pulse. Witches gather at the horizon’s edge, their songs woven from dust and grief. They tell me the...

  He holds an encyclopedia of hurt— its pages smell of dust, iron, and lilac smoke. Every word an echo of his mother’s decisions— the ones that carved small altars into his bones. When he reads it, the lamps flicker. Ghosts of his past selves step softly from the corners— the boy with wet eyes and silence in his throat, the youth who tried to burn every tender thing he touched, the man who listens now to the wind as if it might forgive him. They gather around his desk, their shadows whispering like old paper set aflame, and he writes— each sentence a resurrection, each paragraph a spell to summon light from the long corridors of loss. Outside, the desert hums— an expanse of longing where no love grows without pain first rooting itself in the heart’s dry soil. He’s learned this truth: from ruin comes language, from ache, the sacred ink. Some nights he thanks her— the mother who became a storm he had to survive— for teaching him how to find beauty in the wreckage. The encyclopedia cl...

  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...