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.

There are these things called alluvial fans. They occur when a river gets stumbling drunk and deposits/blows/ralphs its insides at the feet of its unrequited love--the delta. In this regard, the delta expects it. The delta exists for it. There aren't many things for which they exist mutually. You say they can't be what they've always been, but symbiosis is all they know. In this regard I'm wrong because alluvial fans occur when the river abruptly decreases in velocity, or even stops, causing silt and sediment to pile up in said love's mouth which is a ravine, you say, and not a delta. The difference gouges deep. For the sake of argument, I'm the river and you're the ravine, and I've been dammed, but this isn't funny to you.

On fate

I asked someone who knows me very well if he believes in fate. He said no, and I immediately stopped all beliefs in fate. If I kissed your knuckles, that was me and not fate. Tickling your sides till you threw me off the bed and bruised my thigh yellow-green and gray--this was us relatively and not inextricably.

It's impossible to tell how exhausted a language is. I've spent years on a single letter. They have names and I sing them into the wind. Long gone and sing-songy. They're erosive elements that wear down my teeth, but that was me not knowing. You can say you're sorry, but the wind gathers the names.