Go to sleep. Pattern your heartbeat after. Go to sleep that you may wake up in a new world. Where the clock has been reset.

Remember. Remember that the world is juxataposed. And aligned with. All the franctic nightmares you drink down they vomit up.

A fingertip apart we feel the air for an indication that we could. Or did. Like fallen rain we make our way into the sewers, Where losose change is lost. Where all forsaken is sent.

A dial tone between then and now it harbors. So redundant. Like memory is. The caustic glue that mends broken hearts. The blades that shred the evidence that.

I want to be alone, but I don't feel that I ever am. They smother me in their expectations. But never get what they want.

In failure and in triumph still the same. Hour after hour falls into. And those faces distort to fit their masks.

Not ugly to anyone except ourselves.

As we take them off and learn we were not changed by, but forced them to fit us.

If ever there was a mask and it wans't always only us.

Last night I'd only had three beers and then I decided to go to bed. And so I did. And fell asleep fairly easily. I almost always have four. I used to have five for awhile. So first I was getting worse, does this mean that now I'm getting better? Is this progress?

How could it be. Not possible. When I know it was three beers years back that led me to four and later the four that led to five. I've only managed somehow to rewind a bit, but once I press play again those same scenes will inevitably unfold the same as they did then.

Go back far enough it was only one. Even further back, it was none at all. How did none become so many? Choices. Not bad ones. Not good ones. Just the kind you don't realize you've chosen until it's too late to take them back.

So now it's New Year's Eve. The one night it's acceptable to drink as much as you want. The night where you pass out then wake up to a whole new year. An empty notebook. It's just begun. And you can do whatever you want with it.

People make resolutions. To become what they perceive as 'better people'. I've never been one to make resolutions. I never could resolve anything. Not myself. Nor anyone. And the changing of the hours, the days, the years, whatever, never seemed to have much impact. Just numbers and labels. That's all they are. Imaginary sign posts in our minds we use to reassure ourselves about how far we've gone.

Why celebrate how one year melts into the next? Pretend it can help us alter ourselves. When in reality it only emphasizes how very stagnant we are.

Everything around us is in constant flux and yet, we remain true to our most abject of conditions. We use events like this to tell ourselves we do change and can. But the truth is, we're the one thing that doesn't.

Absolved of every sin, except the one with which you now debate. Turn key orphans in locks picked shudder and turn to accomodate lost cylinders. Changes in climate.

We turn. The puzzle solved and wonder how. Amd if we could do it again.

That those pieces would yield the same way were it all to be taken apart and reassembled.

If time would allow. And this glass would relent. Looking out. Always looking out, but unable to see in.

And be seen. Caught on the tongue as fallen snowflakes might be. Found in the instant that they're lost.

The sugarless taste of winter and the empty reach of want.

As if it could be or that weakness would absolve.

It tastes just like summer, but I always wake up to the cold. They exit like the smoke does. One breath at a time. Until nothing remembers, but everything once was.

As if it could be. As if I'd know if it were to come.

Just then in its endless erudition. Learning in that existential way that lives tend to favor. Unrelenting and unwilling to acknowledge how real it is.

As if it could be. As if it wever was.

Groping now in your cold tumult. Your life only a pronoun. In your long sleeves. With your covered arms. Inky flesh prevails no expectations upon. Witty chestpieces fool them all.

Alone is the default. All other settings are temporary.

The bearings scream. The motor combusts. All the spinning has served little purpose. Other than to placate. Color the veins of dead leaves.

And once it's quiet again, you find yourself wanting those noises.

Because those sounds are real when nothing else is. The echo of the last drop as it catches your lips. THe rumble as glass and desk connect. The sound of empty in everything.

The sound of yourself and all you can do is listen.

It's gone and I never even saw it leave. It must've been. Or else how could I feel its loss. Like day turns to night sereptitiously. So quietly those fingers become a fist.

My shoulder is this chasm. Choking on all the words that drop. My tears are fallen. Not caught.

It left, though I never felt its entry. It's exit was acute. A triangle of nights that all pointed at. So many circles without their degrees.

It's gone like so many things that people claim. Fast talking hearts and amiable salespeople. A discount at a time they measure and negate.

How hard would it be to love me? How difficult could it be? To look at this broken staircase and place your foot upon it. Feel the climb it wishes to give.

How useless am I. Worthless as I've ever been. That even in your most desperate hour still you chose not to come to me.

Must it be? That everything that we share keeps us apart. That love adheres to such strict boundaries.

Where am I now? Nowhere. Always.

Broken or together. Still you see the same pieces. And you want none of them.

It's gone, but I still hope for its return. It's a collage. But that one picture is all I see.

Color me in with your heart's crayon. Don't leave these outlines to wonder if.

in mornings both stark and abundant gather the dreams last night dare not have dreamt. and we wake too early. irritated by the dampness. to soiled sheets. itching skin. clothes stained.

and a thousand baths still won't cleanse.

there was a window that briefly opened. i stuck my arm out and felt the kiss of an eager wind. as it carried life close to its breast. adn though i wanted it so much, i knew i belonged behind the glass.

perhaps in a life long gone we each were beautiful together. and only in this one we stare and wonder from behind these barriers.

it's life that revs under our flesh as we swallow the world in medicated capsules. it's the past that tunes these heavy engines as they rumble and moan for roads we'll never fetch.

it ought to suffice, just to ask, but the answer's a much greater burden than the question.

i don't know what we could be. but i know what we've been to each other.

truth accomdates. and life is lenient. but memory is so strict.

it's not hard to live with, but it can make it hard to want to live it.

don't you remember. don't you dare. it's not ours to keep anymore.

He watches from a distance. And I watch him, though he's not really there. I see him in my mind. 2am full of wine and uneasiness. Staring at the empty cyberworld out there as it vaguely stares back. Alone on Christmas Eve. 5pm, Christmas Day, again we are alone together. Staring at those former paths overgrown. Watching as the footprints fade behind the cloak of life's persistence.

I wonder. No. Fret over how he feels. Is he lonely. Is it my fault because I couldn't settle for what he was able to offer.

What he never understood. What I don't guess he can. Is that I didn't want more. Just to know somehow that what I was getting was genuine.

But maybe. Sometimes, I think. It wasn't him. That no one could ever convince me of that.

Alone can be seductive. Like any other drug. We start out wanting just a little and soon we don't know how to escape it. Even when we know we've had too much.

See, I thought I was punishing myself when I left. I never imagined it could matter to him.

Alone together. It broke my heart many times, but sometimes I still miss it.

just one night
such as this,
waiting for;
its gift to
be opened.


just one night
in all those we
dare collect;
chasing itself
like a string of lights.

just one bottle
and something changes,
the color of the night
as it bargain with
lives unwanted.

clean lines in the
darkness delineate, the
boudnaries of this island
as it fondles sharp the
edges of its coean.

no time left to amend
for promises inconsistent,
just night on its sharpest
edge, not asking, but
wanting to be seen.

in all the colors
that have always been there.

I was never more alone than when you were inside me. Filled with an emptiness so profound. That you could be inside my very skin and still I couldn't touch you at all.

Laying there afterwards deflated and numb. There is no pleasure in pleasure itself without substance.

Laying there afterwards it occured all of a sudden. You looked right at me, but I was not what you saw.

I've never been more alone than when I'm with someone. They pull their flesh close to mine. Stretch it across that cavernous expanse. A temporary bridge that always recoils leaving me stranded.

It's so much easier to be alone with yourself than to be alone with somone. Nothing lost. Nor to be found. No afterwards to underscore the obvious.

That alone is not a place I visit. It's where I live.

No afterwards here. Only ends.

your bewildered heart
beats on unceremonious;
in the was that is
we are now unto it given.

cold junkets of love
leave doting dreams
unattended; skeletons
turn to dust as we wait,

for all those things
to change that never will.

i have every night we
spent together, to prove
to me what i once was, but
it still isn't real.

it couldn't have been, otherwise
it would still be true.

if not here with me now,
then when, if ever could
you have been?

waking to the sky
too soft, and confessions
of friends, so the same,
lovers lost.

but what is gone
declares itself as never
having been, by the token
that it was not sought.

in dangerous nights with
your thoughts, you abide your
truth, until none is kind
and all is false.

it's alone that we are,
together or apart;
i've always known this,
so why is it more real tonight?

that we wore each other
lik faded jeans, until
we'd known no other skin.

that it became so true to me,
that i could believe the same of you.

I like to make a path down the center. There are three columns, four rows deep in every twelve pack of beer. A wall of bottles on either side as I travel through 12 ounces at a pace.

Protected from all that's outside those walls. At the center is everything and nothing. Just where it belongs.

But then, when the last bottle's left still blocking that path, i turn my focus to the edges. Because you have to leave something at the end of that road to keep yourself moving.

Who is that ghost in the mirror as I pass. All dressed up in her distorted wisdoms. Switching moods like songs because none seem to fit.

There's always a first bottle. Always a last. But how many are between them isn't so much a number as it is a measurement.

How far we've gone. So far still to go. So many walls. So few ways to go through them.

Who's that ghost? It's obvious. In every path. And in every wall. In every ounce it took to find them.

The center is what I seek, but god, how I miss the edge.

In the midst of a war with my registrar to transfer a domain it occured to me how powerless I am. As angry as I can sound it's still only words. Splintered moments digging paths into empty skins.

They enter on one end and quickly exit out the other. Almost as if they never were there to begin with.

In the midst of this western blasphemey we call christmas, it occured to me that I'm still waiting on a package.

Time hovers its nooses around these necks and the more we struggle the tighter the knot grips.

What it is I could give to them that I haven't already is unclear.

We'll find out I suppose when and if that package is ever delivered.

There is no normal life. Only time smoldering as it does in the throes of its fire. There is no green grass. Just fields that go on forever. As colorless from this side as they are from any other.

There is no empty nest. Only fledglings that failed to fly. Crippled at the base of this tree we call life.

I don't know when the sun went down in your world, but I do know it won't rise in this one.

Find yourself first and then everything else will be easier to.

Your tragedy is you don't know how fortunate you are.

The smell of winter is calming and barren. Dull lights on each corner reckoning with the night. Thin moon slithers in the sky. And nothing moves out there except the exhausted sigh of the wind. As it carries on its endless journey to nowhere.

The silence is a shroud that this coffin must wear.

It's not something one can just walk away from. So many years between myself and living.

Winter. It's when rain takes form and learns to be caught. So why does it not change me? Also make me solid?

So that they could hold me if they should want.

It's when the trees bare their naked flesh and flaunt every vunerability. So why are all my leaves still intact?

Why does the winter change the world out there and not the one within?

Maybe it's not the winter's fault. Perhaps I melt before I ever get close enough to know the warmth of their grasp.

Are these words only empty skins discarded by the thoughts that once wore them? Life in its persistence negotiating truth with its victims.

What was held, was I not held by? Merely clutching the air as I imagined that flight.

Coutning off. Counting down. Counting on. Numbers too sparse. Bottles growing heavier the more I take from them.

We are not what we give to. Nor what we take from. Only what we are left with after those callous arbitrations are done.

The morning in her eyes as we are loosed from sleep. The color of her lips as those dreams escape her pillow and her head is gently lifted.

Waking soft to hours dense. Touching thick with fingers lost in the prospect of skin too intense. That every feeling is echoed from the beginning of our lives to its furtherst edge.

I never wanted to live, but you thrust it upon me. I didn't want to know how it felt, but you gave me no choice.

And that is how you left me.

Every decision, even the tiniest, carries a lifetime of consequence. Had I back in 82 worn the black jeans instead of the blue ones, maybe today, I'd be a famous artist. Had I not gone to the 7-11 that night for coffee, maybe I'd have written those perfect words that would immortalize me.

Probably not on either.

But some choices have clearer consequences. Like shall I have another. And shall I have one more after that.

Or should I meet him. Taste that first kiss. Can I have just one? Or will I need more and more until it's all I want.

People are like beer. You twist the cap off and some intangible drug is released. At first it doesn't taste that good, but the more you drink, the sweeter it becomes.

And they change you. How you feel. How you act. Until you begin to wonder how you were ever the person you were before then. Not sure that you ever really were.

But there's no answer. No reason. Just lives bisecting each other at such acute angles.

But no matter what's in it, eventually, if you swallow enough, the bottle is empty. Not just the contents. But what you thought you found in them. That elusive component that changes mere time into what we call life.

I lived once. For a moment or two. And I often think I'd have been better off never having known.

Then what I long for would still be unreal. Only imagined. Not something I can remember. Not soemthing I know can happen.

if [now] is true,
[then] must be false;
when {tomorrow} dotes upon
moments unabsolved,
then you've already
chosen your future.

in short breaths that
leave you limp and brimming
with a milestone of memories
that now crack and crumble while
in your heart time refuses to pass.

in a smokey box you lock yourself
so that the outside should reflect
what lies within; life is only a template
applied to naked skin, and we
wait for the transformation.

some cocoons bring forth a
creature changed, while others
still, lay forever dormant.

It's absolute. /heart. Return to the root and follow the path. ://what if. When. Otherwise. Else. Always how it might've been. Never how it is.

One stray fingernail caught under your skin. One message left. One more night that never had to happen.

Leaving with less than you went in with. The exit taunting so far away. Leaving. If you ever do. With so much less than you came here with. Choosing to give. Never thinking how much might be taken.

It's relative. ../us. You only once. Just one node taller than. And in this schema there is to be found an attribute that tells us where. And why. And if.

Where on that server it does wait like a throat pressed against the blade. All sacrifices ready, but still you hesitate.

Red lines drawn in your flesh. Sharp nails digging at. Feeling them now raised up against. Sore and yearning for something that can't be dug up.

Always so near. Always so far. Like everything real is. Turn your cheek to the window and wait to see what it reflects.

Just scratches. Unconscious map drawn upon unknowing skin.

Just scratches. Pain looking for its translation.

Not among friends. Not among anyone. It all went wrong. Everything I touched. Til only pieces were left to pick up. Sharp slivers that sneak under tender skin. And are so hard to coax back out again.

It all went wrong. Maybe it always has been. And it's just now that I'm noticing.

Not among friends. Nor enemies. All strangers. Blank faces gazing passed this ghost's muted screams.

It all went wrong. It must always have been.

This broken cure leaves me so the same. This callous antidote no longer saves. Now it only prolongs the inevitable.

Halting death a breath at a time. But it comes still. Slow and determined. It comes regardless.

It was always here.

From the moment I came to exist. It all went wrong. It always has been.

Because I make it so.

Where shall I go when this road ends as it is nearing that closure. Circle back to the start. Repeat these raindrops one by one until all is saturated.

Where does it lead me? In stark colors too pungent. Step by step those stairs that took me up now lead me down. As if time were playing backward and I'm just what I was before this. Except for the fact that I need it now to be anything at all.

And to remember. Always remembering. The curse of having known such beautiful atrocities. That those holocausts of the heart might somehow liberate those ghost that still linger. Out of those chambers to where death doesn't know them. Or else isn't real.

Is it not true? As once was promised me. That hope is often fetched with the loosest tether. That the less we want the more we see we have.

Or something similar. That all these questions might someday cease to ask. And finally have their answers.

Like a cold bottle to dry lips. More than wetting them it has so many other subtle purposes. Make me whole. Then carve those pieces. And then leave me to myself. To arrange them as I see fit.

Letting this disease arbitrate every instance. Until no other picture ever was.

And that is the best way tos fall asleep. The best way to wake up. Spinning in this flightless orbit. No sun. No moon. Just the sharp lips of time as they kiss my throat.

And my bridges built from the blood.

Smoking the last of one more cigarette as against the darkness it teases its breath. Swallowing the last of the bottle's urine I know why they call it wasted. And how often it is.

Won't I wake up in the morning again, just like I always do? Hush the alarm. Waken the coffee and begin that tedium anew.

I guess I will if experience is any measure.

But sometimes I still wonder what color the grass is in different fields. How many shades of green they could impress. How brown they may threaten. Any if there is any color still to be found in all this gray.

Fondling the silence until it moans I wonder when I'll hear the sounds. I know they are there. Somewhere in this sprawling darkness waiting to be found.

It opens wide its shallow mouth and I slither down its throat. Cold rim textured with the flesh of regret. Firm shaft sweating against the friction. Antidote flailing against the disease. Until both are lost.

I'd always thought there'd be time enough. For whatever it was I was supposed to fix. But now I know there never was.

Sheltered in the margins are all the words the page once waited for. Puzzles that can't be solved. Missing pieces.

It's over, though it's yet to begin.

An intrusion of life is all that keeps me from.

there's a pillow
in her breath just
before she begins
to speak;

to soften,
to cushion,
to smother
the grief.

there's a struggling
streetlight in her
words, that flickers
off and on;

biting at the
darkness, constantly
warding off its
relentless attack.

and she knows she
shouldn't be alone,
but this is what
she must be.

Multiplication: 4 times 3 is twelve. Twelve, twelve ounce bottles in a case. Division: 12 divided by 4 is 3. Twelve bottles lasts just three nights. Two 12 packs still one night shy of a week.

It all adds up to costing a lot. In so many ways I hadn't anticipated.

I remember when it was all so frivilous. So easy to stop. But I don't know why now it's not.

The pages are the same thickness, yet hte ink bleeds through much quicker now. The ink is just as black, but it looks darkner since.

The faces. The memories remain unchanged. But like the end of any song they fade away.

Were the colors not enough. The truth not evident? I bled all over you and yet you you remain unstained.

Time didn't reach me, but you did. Colors on the verge of. Lips so secure against.

Every bottle emptied fills me up with all that was never there to be found in other sources.

just a turn of my head
puts you back in my sight;
long ago back in the present
like magic,

as if time is not prescient
upon these moments we collect.

that we have some control
or at least can still pretend that we do.

while these lives pool
in our hands;
drop after drop reached for,
but never caught.

times is not what it takes,
but what we're given.

adn when we're forsaken by it,
we've only oursleves to blame
for having wasted.

it's a color you can't see;
a number you can't count,
and then you try to count,
but there's nothing.

it tastes good only because
everything else tasted so bad;
you could live like that,
but you don't have to.

you could bear it,
and you'd survive, but
why would you want to.

I turned to her in that last hour and thought what we had cultivated. Slender stalks soon to be crushed under the winter's weight. Because the cold always comes now matter how warm it's been.

It seemed the time to run after, but I didn't move. Tucked neatly into the folds of solitude it seems life is only a burden. Some rare flower hidden away on a mountain's edge. Blooming where no one can see it. What for? Why if?

Do you live simply because you can? Do you want these scents, these confections of the world? Or are you just there because that is where you've always have been?

I touched her once with words so pale that she saw right through them. As if in that hollow she saw herself and we both longed to know that anyone else could be so shattered. To discover at last if it was only ourselves whose pieces no longer fit.

And the more we push them back together the further they splinter.

I wanted to be, but it was long too late. Too many sad songs. Too much faith in them.

She couldn't wait. And I knew why. Because there's no recovery. Only limping onward without those crutches, though still your legs haven't healed.

She stumbled and I wanted to catch her, but she was out of my reach.

I may have touched her. I know that she touched me. Even without the benefit of flesh it was still quite real.

Sometimes I wonder how my my life might've differed had I been raised from a child to believe in a god. Would I still believe? Would I be happier? Sadder? The same?

Because even though I think it's all a lie, I'm not so sure there aren't some lies worth believing in. If it's not a lie to you. If it's your truth and you're better off for it, it doesn't really matter if it's actual fact. I don't think when you're dead and you find out there's nothing after you kick yourself for having thought there'd be more. But while you're still alive, you need something to live for.

There are happy atheists. And miserable christians.

And it's a shakey fence. How much delusion is solace and how much is just escapism, denial. If it need not be based in fact, there are all sorts of things one could choose to believe in for that sense of hope human life might otherwise lack. There's Santa Claus. Happily ever after. And social security.

That's why mankind created alcohol and drugs and all those other similar things. Because it seems to me no one really believes in anything. All the god-fearing. All the pious. If god and heaven are so great why aren't they more eager to get there. Why do people for the most part wish to prolong their lives for as long as possible, to sickening lengths, even it means being a burden on society and the people they claim to love.

Everyone seems to be so fascinated by people who live into their hundreds. Awestruck even. Why? Why want to keep living so bad if you think there's paradise waiting for you when you die?

That is how I know it doesn't really matter that I wasn't brainwashed as a child to think there's a god or a heaven. That is how I know no one really believes. And I'm only alone in admitting it.

What I see are people using their delusions of god as a way to keep themselves alive. It's their excuse to go on living because they're so afraid to die.

Everyday, just to get through it, we tell ourselves, our children, our friends so many lies. It's no wonder we get confused as to what it actually is.

What's truth? Imaginary? Real? A precarious balance of the two. The truth is, the truth is whatever you want it to be.

A frozen pond we skate across never knowing when or if it will break open and pull us down below its murky surface.

Just one crack in. That's all it takes.

all days sacrificed
to learning;
in your cloud
you wait to rain;

while i wait for
the result.

you were so blue
in your ultimatum,
so cold with an
unbearable truth.

you begged, but
i couldn't save you;
anymore than i was
able to save myself.

you didn't look,
but it still saw you,
as the truth parted its hair,
and all fell into place.

a rainbow without the colors
it led us to, where the treasure kept
what we should've always known.

Whenever I attempt to learn something new it always ends up teaching me how little I did know to begin with. The more knowledge I think I've accumulated the less it seems I actually understand.

And stubborn souls that won't stop until all issues have been resolved never get to rest. Because for every problem solved a new one will crop up.

That is why there is no rest for the wicked. Or for anyone who's ever tried.

Hearts parse conditionally. Based on if's and else's. And the log is filled with exceptions. Until at last nothing shows. But all still is.

The page unfolds in soft delerium. Fragments of life populate empty instances. Until everything I'd placed in them is lost to the poor syntax of the people we've become.

As if skin could be a reference. Or hope were a constant. When all the while it was the variable we were lacking. Some undefined placeholder left out of our lives.

Wherein would magically appear the remainder of all the functions incomplete until then.

If only we were as simple as all those things I still don't understand.

I still wouldn't know, but I'd be one step closer.

Crooked glasses. They hurt my head. Sight askew. In folding waves unaborted. Just like the night we first partook. And ever after that suckled that vein. Until no blood was left.

I made my way down the stairs. And had always planned on coming back up.

But the stairs became a slope. The molehill became a mountain.

And there I was at the bottom. As if I hadn't always been there.

The problem is I'd trusted myself.

I died a long time ago. Just no one noticed. Even I didn't. Life. One sip at a time. In fifteen minute increments. That's not living.

Every pace had a purpose. But not the one I had assumed.

Every night has its graces. But not enough.

For poorly folded people. All creased with the indications of shapes they'll never become.

It's not as if it ever mattered to anyone, but us. But sometimes it stills seems as if the whole world depends upon.

Or at least that it once did.

It's home where you want to go. Though here is where you are. Combustible moments threading through the needles in your thoughts. Just one more stitch and the hem will be sewn. It sitll won't fit, but will be closer to fitting we hope. As long as that knot at the end doesn't disappoint.

It's so ambiguous. You call it by its name, but it doesn't come. So you name it again and wait for the response.

It's never coming, but you keep trying to convince it.

Like everything in that pandora's box you keep. Nothing in it. And yet everything. Everything's gone except the urge to look inside of it.

Everything escaped. Everything except hope. So the story is told.

It should've been the other way around. Lose hope first and all else is of little consequence.

But there is it. Radiant with self-importance.

But they don't realize it would never leave. No need to secure the lid. It never leaves. Even when you wish that it would.

Cold Pandora's on my backporch all rife with plagues unbecome. They promise loss, but never are. Picking hearts like unkeyed locks. Until every key is broken.

Cold Pandora come be my heart. You are the shape it's become.

There were things I had intended to write. Notes taken. About influences. Both external and inherent.

I wrote, "Influences both humble and arrogant lurk in so many places we would never suspect they'd hide. Influences of the soul and yearnings of the heart. And even flesh sometimes betrays these frail skeletons that softly give it life."

Thought about how readily we change to accomodate those we wish would. And how the more we do the less respect they have for us.

We've always known. Always been warned Above all else, always be yourself. And never try to change anyone else.

It's good advice.

Change isn't something we can make. Like the snow that sometimes falls. It's just a random act.

And the people we love. Or try to at least. They're just lottery tickets. Odds are we'll never win.

I had wanted to be more cheerful. Because it's that time to be I guess. Colored lights and carefully selected gifts all wait for those who have someone on their list.

I had wanted to say don't change to accomodate anyone. Because the more you change for them the less reason they have to love who you really are.

If it could be, I'd make it so for everyone. But since it can't. I only hope time is more lenient on those that don't have.

I've so many wishes. But this oen the most. That life knew sometimes hwo hard it is on us.

It's cold enough now. Cold enough outside so that it doesn't seem so cold within.

Harsh habits chap naked lives until they're raw. I never felt like an adult until I became an addict.

Winter always makes me envy the trees. How every autumn they shed each leaf. And all winter long they wear nothing at all. But still, come every spring, they always grow new ones in their place.

I'm no good at letting those leaves fall. Nor very adept at replenishing.

The colors may change. But the colors were never what I saw.

Life is what they were. Connected to me by the most slender of links. Growing mysteriously from of these dead branches.

I could blame the wind. Blame the seasons for severing us. But I know I just didn't hold them tight enough. Or that they chose to leave.

He didn't love me either way. Drunk. Sober. Same reaction. Empty tunnel. Silent train. I should've understood. And I would've if. I mean, I do in that hopeless sense. That if you never allow it to begin you never have to live to see it end.

For awhile he loved me both ways. Then later neither. So it stands to reason that nothing changes me except for my own actions.

No bottle of beer made him love me more nor less. No lack thereof altered the wide of his eyes as he stared. He loved me with or without. Until it came to pass that I loved it more than anyone.

I wonder sometimes had things been different, how we might've loved each other had we really had the chance.

Had my life not taken we where it has. And his not swollen to such an extent. If there was more to be than what we are.

No time to answer to. No moments scattered. As if we were born right then. Too new to know all we always have.

He took the drink in much the dame ways I did. And so he left us in the same way he had entered.

Just what had been in its infinite doubt. That these lives could ever. That we lived regardless of the circumstance.

No tomorrow on our back porch. No yesterday to stain our lips.

You can flip it, but either side is the same coin. You can toss it in the air. But you can't tell it where to land.

That is how we love and still lose eachother.

Or how we tell ourselves that we did.

Two sides to the same coin. You and I. Or once we were.

have i not, with taloned tongue
grabbed that rodent from
the mouth of its den;

where skies melt to wings
unclenched, in swift strokes
the meat is rendered.

we sat at the top of the
bed, with the orgasm still
in our throats,

and waited silently
for something else
to let us be.

i spilled those words
with all my ink, as i told
myself not to.

we laid against the sheets,
the hours not asking
what i had wanted of them;

it came like a moon
sneaking quietly into
the steadily darknening sky;

and the same way it would leave.

songs about, and pitiable words
all frantic with,
the void that wouldn't consume.

you lay there in the
folds of my thoughts
unwrinkled by;

as i would wait for the
creases to impress,
but nothing changed;

other than my perception.

we lunged like eagles
in the hunt, claws drawn,
as tight as moments kept;

and each time led me
to the next, as alone
together we travelled;

so alone together.

Passwords. What are yours and where do you use them? What is it they protect?

I know there are many areas in myself that won't open until the appropriate input is given. And oftentimes I myself don't even know the correct password. Not on a conscious level.

But alcohol is a skeleton key. A virtuoso hacker. Unlocks everything inside. Decrypts the most dense layerings. But it's also a virus. Every instance you delete, it only replicates itself again.

So you're open. Everything is reachable. But now you can't close. Until you can find a way to remove it from yourself entirely.

But what then. All sealed up as you were before.

Can I forge some keys from this disease before it must be gone. Or must I choose between release and relief?

Passwords. We all have them. I have mine and you have yours. Secret devices we use to access what we have locked up inside.

Some passwords protect us. Others only confine.

If sober is too sharp an angle. And drunk too soft. Where then does that leave? Rooms where it's much too dark because the light leaves so much exposed.

It's easy to admit your weaknesses. Too easy. Even easier just to forgive yourself any one of them. Because sometimes it's nice to be helpless. So very flawed. Then every success is a triumph. And every failure just because.

Whether you're an alcoholic or just someone conflicted with one the story's the same. Happiness is sold in six packs. But you never get what you pay for.

It's easier to live with yourself if you can bypass the whole living aspect.

Sometimes it's better to be what you've become than to be who you are.

If you're out in the middle of the ocean you can try to swim back to shore, but whether you do or whether you don't is of little consequence. Either way you'll drown.

It's merely a matter of preference deciding if you want to die trying or just let it happen.

Turnstyles in the heart seat memories one rotation at a time. You drink because then it's so much easier to listen to the noise of all those passengers passing through them.

Because the truth is you don't want them to go anywhere. But go they still do. To places you can't follow. To destinations you wish you knew.

It just kinda happens. You wake up one morning and you're not who you were the night before. Soft habits harden and you can break them, but you just keep wishing they were still soft. Like they used to be. When you could still mold them into the shapes that you saw fit.

It just happens. Like everything in life does. Not with a shout, but rather with a whisper.

You could break it. But then all you would have is the pieces. And what to do with them?