Shit-faced gods drink the urine. Old men pissing themselves and fetuses miscarried. Dead mothers cradle cracking dolls. Inhaling life in the failed nature of trust. Science never planned far enough ahead to account for so much loneliness.

She argues with the darkness as she would anyone so stubborn as to think that she isn't aware of everyone. People. Needles. Their threads swimming through her gaping wrists. In a relentless quest to keep alive what has always been dead.

It's all tomorrow. It's all so yesterday.

The ceremony of life too much like a funeral she says.

Come the saints in manic pause. Laden with paradise obese. And starving doors. Play. With broken toys in hollow rooms where no one talks. Children lost in over sized skins. Rewinding the highs of crashing Edens.

Face the bed. Coax the choice. In stumbles of trust that inevitably betray delicate demons. Not as evil as they thought they were. Trace the wrinkles in the dark with a heavy finger. Drawing pictures no one can see. Saying things no one can hear.

Pressing the pain for some relief from all this numbness. Every breath a siren. Rushing people away.

The universe is big, but the world is small.

When you don't want to be found.

I turn on the light and wait for someone else to see.

What I always have.

The quantum of her frown. The mechanics of her stare. Dimensions discovered. Time travel in the purest sense. We go back. We remain here. Stretched between the world we exist in and the one we remember once lived in us.

I don't have a shadow where I am. Just men masquerading as equations. Plus. Minus. Exponents. There is no light from above to mark my stand. But I know I am standing here. Not looking back.

The volume of his loneliness is calculated in simple terms. Multiply the man by the women. Determine if he has had enough of them.

Extraneous vaginae make him masculine. Finding the one he wants makes him a man.

It's hard to say what I want. Other than nothing. The sweep of flesh into the volatile Chambers of careless touch. The buck of angry hours as we try to ride them into narrow slits of future. The saddles on their backs thick between the moments we try to pair.

The reins we grasp a trivial component of a greater chaos. I could be your future. And your past. But anything else is just the loneliness demanding a fair percentage.

What I lose. What I've lost to them. Comes back. In dead flies to empty from the lamp. Changed the bulb or live in the dark. I can't decide. What I want to do.

What I could want. Anything I could expect. I know who you are. I won't dare to wait for you to be someone else.

I wouldn't try to dissolve the layers of time between us. But I sometimes think its closer than I had anticipated.

Fools and women try to reconcile the math of absent men.

Close enough.

Or too close still.

It's hard to know.

Not bending down. Trying to pick up. The shadows.

Is dark enough.

In that abyss. The holes in her head propagating. Splinters of sound. Fidget under her skin. People. Fierce infections of touch determined to find her weakness.

She is not immune to lonely men. Nor sad men. But she often confuses them with the manipulative ones.

The canyon. The endless pit falling into my hands. Relentless downpours of nothing. Drown failing fists. Until I am incapable of holding onto anything.

Anyone.

Years later. Frozen parachutes make us fall faster. I cannot hear what you're saying. You speak too softly. And I have grown deaf from listening too hard for all the things I had hoped would be said.

She waits patiently for the parade to stop. Climbs aboard the float after all the spectators have stopped gawking.

No one knows. Or sees her there. As the hours turn dark again.

Pacing in the echoes of their footsteps. Imagining she is not alone.

Counting backwards from zero.

The color of finger tips was quite pink when she reached out to grab the last brick in the little pig's fallen house. The wolf she whispered to herself is not deterred by mortar. Nor defeated by logic.

I don't remember who I had been. Before the moon fell from the sky and the whole of the earth became silent. I can't recall if there was, infact, a life before this. Or whether I would want it back given the choice.

The picinic basket lays still in her fist. Her red hood spoiling the smirk of death. The wolf leans in close. Big teeth showing through the beds he's worn. She pretends she is already dead.

So long that she thinks she is.

She loves each and every one of them. Slowly building her time machine from pieces of skin. The future makes her ill. With lives she not yet lived. The past shouts. But she can hardly hear it.

All this time travel is deafening.

All this counting is endless. Looking for broken needles. Courting dying gods at the bottom of tall glasses.

Maybe next time, she wheezed. As the cum erupted between her legs. All the sounds in her head. Vomiting at once. After a long frat party of men.

It's their cures I find offensive. Seducing the diseases. The banalities of profit. We are cartoons. Their anvils falling on us. We are pop up story books. Grim fairy tales saving ungrateful princesses.

Overwhelmed by the option of giving up. Dormant volcanoes. Their fingers hot with lava. Searching for willing asses.

We weren't even close. To where I thought I wanted to be. The backdoor. Broken bra straps. Calculating. How far we've travelled. How distant it still is.

Just Einstein. A Little bit of Asimov.

The science of thoughts. The robotics of love. As we work ourselves into the puzzle. Brief seizures of touch mislead the enthusiastic. Dying every night only to be born all over again.

I'm not trying to find. Only attempting to prove that it ever was. A few moments here. A few more there. And I am soon enough.

To know I was easy to forget. Pretty child spit out from the throes of choking gods. Swallowed up in the abortions of devils.

Fugues of skin vie to protect the tumor. Lumps at the base of her skull waiting for villains in short supply. Death ignores her. Much the same as life does.

It's strange how that happens.

So often.

The lie. The bitter acumen. Of taste. Sermons of poison. Try to explain. What I don't understand. About this body. The bait not withstanding. The hook still through my lip. Waiting to be thrown back. Suffocating in the process.

This life. In failing increments. The balance. Not absolving. Masks too thick. Gods pretending to listen. As the locomotive buckles under the strain of the stop. The tracks singing their quiet song. In strains of lost. As if I could ever find what isn't there.

The apes in their fortress stuffing the cannons. Some war I've started, but cannot finish.

I blink and it's all gone.

Alone enough at last. To be certain. It doesn't matter.

And it never did.