Intoxicated.

The taste and texture it dances on your tongue, Its like sipping the color, the burgundy red of the wine. And then there is the white one, so tame and uneventful, the taste just doesn't register with me, I don't feel the excitement of drinking the color.

The whole act is crazy magical, the uncorking, the teeny sweet sound of pouring the celestial liquid color, red red red of the mystical red wine. Then swirling it around in the sparkling glass and holding it up in the air into the light to see the color, and anticipate the taste, the taste of the color burgundy.

And as if the whole sensory carnival isn't enough, there is the woman who is pouring it, she is beautiful, with a musical voice as she says things like "fruity, with a hint of spice and velvety overtones marked by sensual smoky base", you had no clue a moment ago what any of that meant, let alone in one single sentence, but right then you want to understand as you sip from the color burgundy.  

The vineyard is on the mountain top and the air is mountain fresh air, the smell is that of fruity spicy quality and you don't need the actual wine to get intoxicated. You feel the color burgundy inside and out and feel light as a kite and flying high as one too.

Haven.

While you were gone
I just lay there staring at the walls and the ceiling
The void, the vacuum that was everything when you weren't in it

Feeling denied of the life force itself
Adrift on an empty ocean of nothing
While you were gone I recited songs of sorrow
Songs so painful they they never made sense

You didn't ask for much
You never expected anything
You liked me for all I was and you loved me more for my flaws
It doesn't seem like asking a lot from anyone
But that's where it is so deceptive
The seductive high to be loved like this, its addictive

While you were gone I realized
Life as I knew it
Existed because you made it possible
To take one day at a time and weather it
You created a haven, for a run away soul like mine

From a battle that went on too long
For wars that were never meant to be won
For nightmares that were more than real
While you were gone I wondered, if you would return at all
While you were gone I thanked you anyway for getting me this far

Highway through Nevada

Dry heat and scrubby fields. Silver stark naked sky, not a cloud in sight. And the moon hung there a burnished gold ball of need. The trees that silhouette in the moonlight look like deliberate cutouts, like apparitions of themselves thin, twiggy and ... desperate woman souls of ages past.

Driving to Vegas through this landscape feels like a journey through a tunnel of extremely painful pleasure. You open the window of your car and and you can smell it, the aroma of the desert. The description of a beautiful haunting desperation.

You can easily imagine a a tiny home somewhere there among the scrubby fields, a newly wed couple that live there and try hard to make ends meet. She is a raven beauty and he is an intense sort of a cowboy. Their home is a dilapidated little place with broken window panes and creaking doors. But each night in the gorgeous desert wind it transforms into a paradise. Then one day he comes home after a hard day's work and finds her gone...gone forever with someone else with more money in search of an easier life. He sits alone in the house with no lights on, only the moon light from the copper moon sweeping in through the open door and the windows.

The pain he feels is a sound of the coyote cries in the far away distance, the warm desert wind and the moonlit glow.

I am always on the look out for the cowboy time and time again when I travel through Nevada, I keep trying to spot him in the dark distances.

This is the way I feel all the way until the dark dark night is suddenly split to shreds by the blinding lights of Vegas, the territory of the raven beauty. This is where she lets it all down, her guard, her shame, her inhibitions. She reigns here in all her glory, writhing in eternal seduction, and wanting more and more and more ...

She is bejeweled and more glorious than the sun. He is lonely and aching and he is the desert himself.