The Tequila’s Truth
“A magic moment to remember,” you said. You kissed my head. An hour later, you were gone. Were you real, or a fleeting vision of want, the quintessence of all that was once beautiful and rare in my life?
Your features continue to haunt my dreams long after my drunken escapades through Cabo San Lucas, one man’s rebel storm-blast through Mexico, hoping tequila and a señorita’s soothing accent will scatter these reveries, once gracefully divine.
Here is not where you are or have ever been. Does anyone really understand? I seek only to be where you are or where you go and go again. No, so I make friends with a tequila bottle, and would love any woman willing to hold my head over a toilet to throw up everything wrong with my life.
In the Sea of Cortez there is a world of calm, a sanctuary, a profound hush until the whales come, bringing with them flowing visions from that other reality’s world of sounds; enmeshed, calling to me.
Perhaps it’s the tequila, me looking into alcohol’s dark truth, how it opens up its warmth to cloak and shield me from the dizzying tidal callings just to say: yes, we are messengers coming from far away, to mate, frolic, drench and burn with a loving fever, carrying our songs; I’m here come and find me.
But the pattern of a drunk’s dreams are often spread out and won’t let me hear, won’t let me see what happens, or what comes up to me, speaks to me and grabs me by the shoulders, shaking and shouting at me while the horizon dissolves into the night.
I have burned up under the sun, then shivered when facing the inevitable. No-one is going to listen.
So the night unfolds and looks at me, you and your face of night, you and your hair, the unhurried lightning of today’s storm. Footsteps on the water without the asphalt’s shining, wandering in the night, asleep under the surge of waves, your breath dampening my forehead.
This is the tequila truth, like the whisper of a pelican’s wings, sensing the way, surging low over the waves to say: yes, I’m coming home to you, to face your absence and weep my guts out.
