Houston in the Early Eighties

before iced coffee came to town, a sump from which I’ve fished many a memory of regret and loneliness and whose misery I now understand came less from my pocked nature than from the chokehold of blue laws, and from my broken-willed Eeyore of a used car which liked to stop stubbornly in Sealy, halfway to Hill Country, and always one day after the insurance ran out, and from the paucity of public space so that we drove (locally) from shopping strip to balding park, once to a leech-infested pond; and owing also to the blinding afternoons that made invisible,