Loss of voice, loss of breathing through

mouth, loss of sense

of smell and then the uncomfortable pause//

a tightening of my own glottis in response to//

a textbook opens its glossies in front of

my eyes, false cord strumming, epiglottis flapping. What does it look like           

now? Your glottis is shaped like a star sucked into the night of…

what I want to do is anything but operate, let nature take

its course as the rambling say in the Texas Panhandle where

the great Palo Duro Canyon's cut out

slowly, little by little by a little

river, Prairie Dog Town Fork,

the byproducts of combustion on human mucosa, bright red

Triassic shales, clay, and sandstone litter its rim with dysplasia, then      

carcinoma in situ,

the Trujillo and Tecovas yellow-pink and lavender shales, full-blown invasive finally

the Ogalalla

sandstone, silt, and caliche, the whole of geologic history in these bare canyon walls

a substrata of damaged mucosa, too,

and what has this to do with loss of a larynx?  You’ll swallow just

the same as before, in fact, never again aspirating on

a cracker in your windpipe.  In the usual sense, no, you will not

be able to swim. Water is sucked straight into

the lungs.  Summer, this landscape is desert-

like. Don't smell and taste go together? Bargaining

against the pleasure of years watching sunsets smoking Pall Malls filterless. As protection

against dust, the trachea undergoes metaplasia to withstand the now

harsh environment, exposure for which you'll wear

a little apron over a bare hole in your neck. Not only

water but wind

whipping through the canyons over years causes such erosion, too.  You’ll drive for

miles across the High Plains south of Amarillo, flat, the treeless country inspiring

only drowsiness, mirages & so

forth, until you enter Palo Duro, overlook the rim of

its eight-hundred foot abyss, at the bottom of which,

a narrow ribbon of lush

cottonwood awaits you: the alternative, you ask—a slow suf-

focation though no one will

describe that for you.