It gets in your blood...

It gets in your blood.

It seeps in like a meandering river, the surface of the water so still, so unfathomable, that it takes a piece of flotsam, a log, maybe a body, silently floating by to give tell to the otherwise imperceptible current.

It slithers in like the moccasin with the fat frog in its mouth, sashaying across the pond as you hurriedly reel in your line and ease back from the shoreline, the sense of an underlying presence of evil not enough to scare you off, subtle enough you think it can be controlled, that you can bask in its shadow without it rubbing off.

It wisps in as you walk through a grove of oaks older than your great grand-father, the moss reaching out to ensnare you in the years and the ghosts who have walked this path before you, bony gray fingers caressing you, leaving tell-tale tracks of their passing.

It comes as a dream, when you're most vulnerable, as you lie under her stars, seeking peace and solace but in the end wide open to the things that pull those stars down from above, remaking them into crystal goblets, those things that kneel at the feet of Bacchus and fill the starry cups with a nectar so intoxicating you'd sell your soul to the first voodoo priestess to lift her skirt and wag a finger in your direction, just so you could lick the beads of sweat that form on her breasts in the heat of the night.

It gets in your blood this place they call Louisiana.