He leans forward and lights a cigarette.  Coreen stares at us,                                                “Oh.  That’s not true at all.  Texas has a lot of beauty to it.  True, it has some bad qualities, but anywhere does.”                                                                                                                     “Don’t try and sugarcoat a hillbilly shit sandwich.”                                                                    She shakes her head at him and looks over to me,                                                                     “Oh, I don’t want to have to elaborate.”                                                                                          No time to elaborate.  The fire and wind and flowers are fusing.  I check my watch and wipe off the back of my neck.  The cherry sunsets of Venus are lost, the vastness of its lemon iron heart is lost.  Streets streaked with penny gold and pussy lace velvet windows are gone now, gone forever, and where they once stood is now a city with a blank face.  Sun dead and grey, fields which harvest nothing but replication of dirt and weeds.  We have been left and forgotten here.  Left to breathe, fuck and rot.  Which is fine.  I imagine it was always like this.  It has always been a displaced sky.  I smell their skin from across the room.  It’s sulfuric and salty.  I remember Angel’s take on the ocean.  She said it was delicious.  I saw it for the first time in 6 years with her.  We had parked by the pier in Pismo.  I had tasted her stomach beneath the bloody wind.  We had intercourse in full view of the water, and I had convulsed into her from behind, my hands lightly holding up the back of her dress, yellow and insane while she gripped the rail at the end of the pier.  Two bums were fishing off the side behind us.  We were quiet and heavy there, and gulls made hungry swoops close to us but the fishermen on the shore threw stones at them.