Words of Acadiana

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...