Southern Air

There's whiskey and Coke
in my Dixie cup.
Jessica is cutting my hair on
some back porch steps in
a green and golden afternoon.
She's revealing the mystery of
the scars on her face.
It was a car wreck where she
went through the windshield.
All that was outside and mute became
loud and real in an instant.

Now I feel too much.

I wake up wrapped in sweat-soaked hotel sheets in
a southern city by the Gulf of Mexico.
I walk out onto the beach and
lay low like bones as the waves stretch over me.