The Street Life of Salamanders: Part 1

She said her name was Tabasco.

it wasn't.

It was true, however, that in the frantically vivid hallucinations that followed our first meeting, i saw her walk down wooded halls, shredding the ti leaf.

Oh lovely deranged sweet sweet deranged; I ran my hands over her life more than once.

She had knock knees. Like anything that springs from wood. She used more prepositions than a prison break. She has, to this day, never finished a sentence.
She stamped her feet and her head shifted from side to side. But you wouldn't consider it punctuation.

She was provoking the wrath of the trespassed margins all along. which preferred abstinence and cleanliness of course.

We talked about all the stupid ways people die. and how many batteries it would take to electrocute someone. And how there's never been a better name for a two-headed woman than Zsuzsanna Budapest. And how good astronaut strawberries would be with pink champagne on a warm night. and the if onlys beginning with if only we had a picnic table! (followed closely by if only we had a woods to put it in!).

Her smile was leathery, worn, like a smoker's kiss, a ranch hand's tan, and manifested itself slowly.

She was riddled with contradictions,
She was held with the tatters.

She pronounced one day that memory's screams punctured her dreams. And they moved along only with the force of the air streaming out of them.

this made a lot of sense to me. it was a metaphor consistent with familiar physics and upheld by memories of cartoons. and everything that passes through my lens is subject to these simple tests. especially dream propulsion.

though truth be told, i think it was more of a massive black hole situation. the surrounding galaxy provided an eloquent spot to nest my own slighter being. and orbit blissfully the borders.

she indoctrinated me in a new shimmering science that was lovely enough to likewise be a religion and simple enough to hold your hand. i never held hands with it but maybe i should have. i imagine her hands were as intelligent as mine, being so too a sensualist. she gave me a stunning paradigm for understanding the earth. she always felt dangerous, like there might be a gaunt insanity in her, peeking out of her person, that i would figure out existed too late because i already loved her and was overly determined almost stubborn when in that state; i just always felt she was about to propose something i could never do and then i would still love her but a rift would have arrived.. but then she didn't. or i could.

She was like jalapeno coffee and my favorite thing in this world is jalapeno coffee.

with a tabasco nip.