I have a mouthful of stars.

When I chew, they burn my tongue and break my teeth and I have learned to tolerate their touch on my tongue so I can maneuver them, burning just the necessary number of taste buds, out of the way of my food, to hold them back from my throat as I swallow.

When I speak they spill out and foam and froth about my words and melt them together or slag them entirely or set off catastrophic reactions that bust word into word and smashing fuse or fis all meanings imploding and exploding like popcorn and gushers and tents taken down at the end of a trip and when they are done my poor words limp and crawl or lumber in their misshapen forms into some semblance of what I had tried to say around the stars in my mouth about the stars in my mouth, which are even now spilling out and boiling ponds of spittle and burning grasslands and dry forests all across the american southwest and these stars in my mouth are terribly expensive and each is filled with diamonds and you cannot have them.