Alan Catlin

Half Way to Hades

“What would the prophet say if he
saw you in a place like this?”
“Pour me one.”

Philip K. Dick

She promised him “a fucking
week of Christmas in hell,” 
but could only manage a few days
of cooking voodoo chili so hot 
their dreams were soaked with 
sweat and blood, sheets torn into
strips for open wounds they nursed on
like succulents, passion fruits
from lands so distant they might
no longer exist.  Nights, after hours
of rough sex, they licked the desert
heat from the short hairs on their
necks, sipping liquid fire from 
the broken neck of Mescal Gusano
Azul, drinking Tecate from chests
half full of chips of dry ice, mist
rising from within to form circles
around the holes between clouds
where a full moon burned,
“I’ll be your Maximilian, if you’ll
be my Carlota.” He said, in the collective
voices of all the no-longer-conscious 
men they’d left behind along the road
they’d traveled of dancing dust devils 
and death, “Shit, man, you take a girl
our for an ice cream sundae and end up
half way to Hades.”
All, the way, he thought, and then some.