a wise old sage from Louisiana, smoking cigarettes,
—which i stole one from that same pack later that day
and smoked it and almost threw up
behind the kind old episcopal woman’s house,
who the sage and i were living with in Memphis in july,
because we both were working on a stage somewhere in town
and we needed a place to stay a while, to watch summer rise from spring,

and i needed a place for you to **** me,
     my phantom,
     you, who, countless times, the Louisianan sage warned me about,
and the old episcopal woman hopefully knew nothing about,

   who, chanting truths of freedom and songs of singularity,
      white-haired, rose-gardening,
solitary and
    alone and
       buried alive
    in the walls of her house,
surrounded by her memories,
like the coffee mugs i accidentally stole
    when I left in August,
which, as it turns out, they were heirlooms of her dead mother’s—
    i cracked them all, i believe—

the louisianan sage, who once tasted the sweat of New Orleans’ blues jazz soul,
      now sitting across from me in the episcopal lady’s back porch,
                sipping coffee from one of her mugs
that i eventually took and inevitably cracked,
      this sage told me wide-eyed through cigarette smoke,
              seeing visions in the june blue sky,
‘the truth hurts. but a lie hurts more.’

the smoke rose to the clouds above our heads
like a sacrifice to god, and i rose with it,
and told him about september eighteenth.

and what it felt like to die
and come here.