Heat waves rise with the morning sun on its horizon, where the road meets the sky, and I walk and I walk and I stumble as I walk away from the nightmare of the scene. The sun now casting light on what the moon could not illuminate last night. The horror of a hungry struggle, both praying for staying alive in this wasteland. The land where you are wasting away as food for vultures who came seconds after I begged for mercy. The New Mexican morning reveals a rotting crime, and the shame hurries me along the road where I walk and I walk and I stumble as I walk away and I look back to observe the goop of pink beneath exposed ribs where dinner has been served. I turn back with a moment of speed at which the crust on my face subsides/wets when new blurry salt trickles down my cheeks and blinds my dried-up vision. Dehydrated vertigo and dizzy spells of rotting memories. Stones in my forehead. I stumble clenching pain of a bruised throat and withered neck muscles. A grip you had first with your songs then later with your hands. Catching each tear with my dusty tongue. Saving the last drop of the oasis that’s many days gone. In my hand – a lock of brown hair, in the other, your CD. A pocketknife pulls out to replace the disc and I lick the red off to savour the last drop that had me blow, lest I become a goop of pink beneath exposed ribs – breakfast instead of dinner. The cold of a metal blade steadies between my teeth fixed and sober as I take the brown lock of yours and braid it into the blonde of my own. So, I walk and I walk and I stumble as I walk away from the feeling of the knife slitting me out of your grip and the heavy wet gurgling of your sweet breath heaving sounds I’ve never heard you sing. If I cannot sing without you then a slit’s between my teeth, but with you I am worse at grips than with the walk of murderous shame and desert stroke of heat. All’s fair when love becomes war becomes survival becomes death, I realise I cannot live with myself living without you. Your CD plays that song and I cry out for the vultures one last time.