1. I've burned many tongues.

2. I wander the house in the dark.

3. I laugh and laugh and laugh.

I'm losing my touch.

Flood waters churned chocolate milk; the trees drank up, over drank, drowned; the telephone poles toppled, but didn't drown, and the wires snapped from the poles, wind-whipped and furious. Electricity surging through the streets made us feel kinetic until morning when the firemen put everything back in proper order. Sporadically in his bed are wet spots that could be from one of four places. He changed the clocks, placed buckets to catch drips, dropped quarters into jars.

The dream you had about running your tongue across your teeth and one-by-one they fell out--it wasn't real, but when you were patrolling quiet streets and found teeth mixed with gravel like common rocks you had the fleeting thought that they might be yours, and you began counting your teeth with your tongue.

In New Mexico I found a tooth in a ditch near where a man cut another man's head off with a meat cleaver.

[Cut is probably the wrong word. Reports say the cleaver was dull, and his accomplices say he struggled to get the damn thing off, and that they were scared shitless, and that the guy wasn't beheaded all the way, but beheaded enough, so "hacked" is probably a better word.]

I kicked the tooth toward a spot where it looked like he might've died, if it was his tooth at all. A friend told me that in Albuquerque you can get meth, blood, and semen by the bucket-full.

The great ironies of war are like digging through vapor. I can't explain how, but there's this: baby's breath is slow to die, and when it dies it still looks alive.

The citadel will crumble into tiny yellow flowers. The hero-worshipers will dissipate like blue smoke, and the half-helmets, bits and stone will erode vaguely in sandstorms and become old teeth. This is much like saying, "I'm fine". This is how ruins are made. This is, it's hard to say where home is, and when he runs his legs feel like giving out but he doesn't necessarily feel a thing.

His sleep is an empty cigarette carton--stale and flimsy. He shifts tectonically, grinds his teeth and dreams of desert gravel. There was something about body bombs, blood jams spit, spit on blood?

but they're crumbs of a language I never spoke.