Sometimes you can't be taken. Now matter how hard they pull. The grasshopper and the ant debating again the distribution of virtue. Maybe you're wrong. Yea, you probably are. And you hope someday they'll prove it. All that's left to decide is which one you are. Ant or grasshopper.

Uninterested or afraid to go.

It probably doesn't matter. They won't ask again.

So you're free to stay. Tracing the dust in the air until memories relent. And give you a glimpse of what isn't there anymore.

Turning over my pencil. Flirting with the other end. The eraser. A wooden stake against this vampire's chest.

Perhaps to turn it all to dust. As if it had never found the ends of my fingers. Never broken free from the prison of my skin. And remained only clouds in a sky not really there. Rain not fallen.

I don't feel wrong. Just have never felt right. All my life shrouded in a nausea that has no origin. All my loves smothered in a mild hangover.

As if I was never really there. And kept hoping someone would notice.

No one did.

I'd rely on myself if that were an option.

12 minutes later none of it mattered. 12 minutes gone by and we were strangers. Looking for our keys. Backing out of already empty parking spaces.

Cause that's what we agreed to when we signed up for this chance.

There amongst her talking dolls and bent pitchforks. With auger in hand the hole did beckon. To be discovered. There with the scissors between her thighs she ran. Adamant about the depth of the wound. The color of the scar.

As if they can be painted on. And she knows this. Because they already have. And all this skin is just wallpaper. To be removed and hung again in a different pattern.

Then this room would be so much bigger. So much more a space I could live in. With a thousand closets to conceal everything I never wanted to show.

And a million shelves to hold everything else I can't discard.

There like tourists in this life the patterns stood. Gawking. The walls accused with shadow. The windows rotten with sun.

So I'm forced to see how bright it is.

Out there.

My metaphor. Myself. Looking back to find I'm not there.

To lose again what's already gone.

Myself. My surprise. Drawing on the walls. From ceiling to floor. Chasing roads that don't go anywhere.

Serving daiquiris to the devil. Hoping the knife will be sharp enough to cut the fruit. As sour as it's become.

Spill the cutting board upon our laps and wait for the juices to tell us the betrayals that have made us better.

He sung quietly with his skin. Out. Out. In. Until. We let the window take us. Yellow sword bathed in blue. Cutting through nothing except the thinnest of orgasms.

We couldn't tell each other what the dark had heard. Lie again like disciples selling their saviors. Like wine. By the glass. Or by the bottle if you can afford it.

The only blood here is the cocktail you ordered.

I learned so much. Or I thought I had. Digging up those graves. Like sewing extra pockets into my jeans. To hold all this change.

I was willing to be wrong, but you didn't care. It had to be harder than that.

Pasting the bandage. To where wounds implore. To feel the tearing as they're ripped off. Barbed wires fencing every vein.

It's not like we were waiting for the sun to rise. Scholars in their ready seats. Taking meticulous notes on this apathy. Distilling logic from people. And humanity from textbooks. Trying to learn what can't be taught.

It's not as though this coma wasn't always there.

I was just the last one to wake up.

And I've imagined you there in every life I've pretended to have. More real than I want you to be.

Lopsided gowns adorning my ankles as I try to dance.

Like it's new. Or I don't know. Where it's going. Like the blood on my cheeks is still wet. And I believe I'll keep on waking up until I know a reason to stay awake.

I have to be somewhere.

Though eyes stand accused of treason.



Somewhere must be.

If I can see far enough to find the eyes that see us. Then I would know.

How far there is to go.

And what all those monsters look like under their clothes.

He always spoke in coughs. Seizures of words surrounded by so much stillness. It was easy to sense what he would say before I could hear it. The onset of the convulsion briefly paralyzing the air between us.

It's not unlucky. It's just life. Being coy again.

I never knew anything until I knew him.

It's dark enough to say it now. Let the walls shed their color. The press of time smoothes every wrinkle.

The limp in his strut. Very subtle. Hard candy conversations melting on my tongue. Sweeter than they should be.

They last too long, but leave me with nothing.

And he offers a whisker, when all I want is a claw.

Dig in.

We laid there afterwards peddling our ironies. To open doors with lipstick on their brassy knobs. It's always when we're finished that I get that sense of having begun. The clothes we put back on transparencies. Stencils for ambush.

And so it goes without much frenzy. This old trampoline.

We should have something to say. A little more soil to fill this hole.

Turning over into each other. Small cogs in a smaller machine. Teeth meeting to turn the other. The crippled smile of bodies trying to mingle.

And there I am wide awake. Scouring the sheets for some evidence of the dream.

stagger the seams

a wickerwork of moments
too often

too near

satisfaction.

as heavy pillows
wear our heads

gravel
filling every feather.

Words not weighed by, but weighted with. There I go being talentless again. Dredging the meat through the shallows of the bed. Scolding the pan.

Determining the density of thought by the balance in action. Wearing stolen bow ties with my rented tuxedos. Focusing on what has a price. The things I can safely lament. Now that I know I could've had them. Roosters with eggs too gold. Counting the carets of their broken shells.

I made this. And now it is making me.

Older than I am. More glass than tin.

I could sleep all day and still wake up tired. Because every time I close my eyes they're still looking for something.

But it's not there.

You'll say I'm a pessimist. That might be true. But it doesn't make you right. Nor me wrong.

It just showcases how hard it is to know someone.

The closest we can get is still a lifetime away from understanding.

What we want from them.

They drove in circles. Small ones. Only two parking spaces wide. Pausing by the cart return before setting off again to orbit the poorly painted rectangles where during the day giant suv's nap. While their owners read books for free at the barnes and noble coffee bar. Starbucks indeed. Gasoline for people.

It kept driving in its circles as a girl nearby began to laugh. And the wolf pack of teenagers with nowhere else to go tormented the people trying to sneak into the Applebee's. Until the squad car scared them off.

There are always children in the supermarket no matter how late I go there. There's always ice cream on sale in the summer and that doesn't make any sense to me. Shouldn't it be on sale in the winter when no one wants it.

I think I liked the idea of driving in circles. Passersby wondering why. I think I liked the poetry in going so far to go nowhere. I wonder if they noticed how accurate they were.

It just wouldn't be summer if something strange wasn't going on. It wouldn't be a picture at all if we weren't ready with our camera.

I see you there looking at me from the other side of the lens.

And you're not wrong.

With rounded thumbs we press buttons that suddenly appear.

He fiddled with the pillow. The microscopes returning to his stare. And I wondered what dance my atoms were doing. Cha-cha or merengue. No matter. He wouldn't know the difference. And neither would I. They all sound like laughter in the middle of sex.

Eyelashes on every finger. As they blink against the hiccup in their chest.

We were watching tv in the dark. Trying hard not see each other. I grabbed the moon from its orbit between our bodies and threw it toward the ceiling. It just didn't belong in that bed.

With a fingernail he wrote his thoughts on my back. I guess they're still there.

When he was done I rolled over and flicked the switch in his palm to the off position. And it was finally dark enough so that we didn't have to see each other.

The shirt creases to match her hunch. As she leans over the edge. A doorway in the ceiling. A teddy bear in a noose. Plaid flannel tries to remember how soft it should be. Drunken buttons scramble to find the holes they must marry.

He's just a puppy. That is all. Eager to make use of all those sharp teeth. A tail he can't catch despite his control over it.

The dark finds its corners regardless of my blindness. The poison on the arrow sticks no matter the archer's prowess.

There's nothing I can do except admit life is bigger than my palette. Too ugly for the makeup I can disguise it with.

He'll say I lied when all I ever tried to do was avoid it. We'll argue for a while before we decide that it doesn't matter what was wrong.

That right never considered our feelings.

It never had anyone in mind other than itself. It never asked us what we've wanted. It just decided what we deserved.

So easy to be wrong.

I tried to say it hard, but fragile was all I managed. Child wearing her mother's dress. Girl pantomiming sex. One shadow at a time learning the flow of their desire. Drug dealer on the corner giving away the samples.

So many ways to be wrong, even when it's right.

I've never told anyone how it felt. waiting. Hoping to be their word search. Anticipating the found. It doesn't feel like I'm there.

Or like they're looking at all.

No one knows how far I've gone. To be myself.

Chase the raindrops from the window until it doesn't hurt anymore.

Wait for them to tell me I'm not their puppet anymore.

We're both serving the goodbye. Different needles are all we have.

To separate. The here from now.

Tepid strands spoil the inflection. Saliva points like icicles. Toward the gravity at the center of his dilemma. No kind way to say. No words that can undo what's happened.

So just let it. Be tragic. For as long as it will allow.

Trace the goose bumps. Connect the dots. With our broken crayons. And empty pens. This is only a beginning of an end. It's mine to draw. As sober as I want.

It's mine to lose. Whatsoever I might've had. Cornered on the balcony with the weight of my wherefores. Seeing Shakespeare's when only Steele's are there.

The romance not withstanding its audience.

This airplane soars briefly before forgetting its thrust. Simple folds create wings from squares of paper. One good push is all they ask.

We don't need to touch the sun to know it's there. Nor swallow the dirt to know the ground is waiting to greet our impact.

If I'm not wise enough by now, I'll never be. If the hurt was meant to teach me something, it's failed.

The paradox of the flesh testifies that the more lovers we've taken the fewer friends we have.

No. I can't see, but I can remember. Where to walk. The flowers with their hearts on display. The steps that wear my feet. From too many passes up and down. Trying to revive fallen fences. Bombs that refuse to go off.

I watched him read. Trying to know. But there's nothing to be learned from this. Not about life. And certainly not about who I am. Just ask.

Give me time to answer.

Because it might take a while.

Just run rabbit. Don't hesitate.

Or else. The tortoise might win.

And all those fables would have proven us wrong another time.

The eggshells are still there. Though the yolk is gone. It's that old sober life I fear most.

Because there's no reason to be born. Nor any to die. Only the ways we find to distort these truths.

He said it was a long drive. Then he turned the music up loud and stopped listening.

I was glad he couldn't hear me thinking. How lonely it was. Borrowing lovers.

I'm not anyone. Not anything. You'd remember. Dead partridge in its stale pear tree. A wilted lexicon of friends and lovers defines.

Words I cannot say.

No spiders with their heavy webs. Prey paralyzed. It looks like a bridge. Thoughts lay in their unspun candy wrappers. Trying to appear hard.

I liked the color when the glass was stiff with humanity. The sober so grave in your questions.I know I was. wrong. Am.

Where are those lovers now. What skin do they wear. it must be someone's. Because it can't be mine.

Dancing on our crutches. Loose pisses trailing their strings behind them.

Ringing the doorbells on those houses made of cards.

Destruction the only way I know how to save myself.

The denim not agreeing I found another fabric. For the time being. As khaki as we are now.

Blistering as we rub against those selfish walls. Sorer because I know I'm not different.

The pin in my hand poised to break it. Collect all that blood for something better.

Turn all these counterfeit hearts into dollar and cents.

Telling myself it's enough.

The echo of submission still raw in the easy-bake oven.

I can't imagine ever having been so young as to believe. Or old enough to forget.

Shiny pages lit up in the dark. Frivolous lanterns drawn in tinsel sparks. The real is what you tell yourself. And what you believe of them. The pitchfork scours the grain from the heart. Bundles it up and feeds it back into the farm.

Life.

There in that lucid dream. Orchestrating every high. And low. Veins pumping paper. Eyes spitting ink. The alarm went off. The blankets sprinted from my legs. Just as I was about to prove to myself what part of it had been real.

I imagined him there touching me as I touched myself. The hush of a stranger's fingernails on taffy skin. Pulling it so taut.

But it doesn't break.

Betrayed again by my compassion.

Anecdotes on etcetera and ennui. Virtue marketed as frailty. The frozen pond looks back questioning my stare. A smile built of a million fissures. Bending the fingers all the way back on the empty glove.

The occasional romantic. The often heart. Drawing itself in the mud. Only when it's raining. Nine-hundred maybe's later I finally got a no from him. Drank the mortar in one gulp. And waited.

Not very long.

For the bricks to set.

In the stubble the darkness draws on these hands. As the shadows wince. In the spasm of every sock as the shoe comes off. In every purl the silence knits. This seizure of expressing myself cripples me more.

I can't scream any louder.

Little girls in big dresses. Pimples coming and going from within soft, velvet mountains of time. Wearing their futures. Already lost in the enormity of what's yet to happen.

Little dogs guarding great riches. As angry with the treasure as they are with those who would try to take it from them. The first musky sip of acceptance. Bristling on my tongue. Velcro laced with barbed wire.

It doesn't matter anymore. And it never will again.

Drunken stop sign winks at me, but I ignore it. With all the pungent grace of dominoes on acid.

I taste the entryway. Thick columns too erect. Tepid bricks with burlap wings. Chasing the arrogant stutter of badly bruised men.

Everything was always bigger than me.

And I just keep getting smaller.

It was the afternoon when the sun first shone. Deliberate and stern. Fate pointing its flashlight at a corner full of tired cobwebs. We wheezed out goodbyes and let Sunday decide what would happen to us.

The blind itinerary of seldom lovers. Destination anywhere else.

He had his medicine to offer. Quell the symptoms for a while. Loosen the collar on this cur. Turn a backyard into a continent.

He had his sympathies. They all did, but he a little moreso. I regretted that I couldn't heal for him. Find a way to make myself better. Because he made me believe the choice was there.

They all pretend to be vaccines, but most are only placebos.

So many people trying to cure their savior of the diseases they've given them.

The blurrier this mirror gets the better I'll remember how clear you once made it.

That I was drowning.

That saving was never what I wanted.

You were so sure I was lost that I almost believed you. You were so certain.

I could be saved that I came so close to letting it happen.

Back to the chair. My nest. I'm not an empty shell. I'm still pecking my way out from the inside of this faulty uterus. Silhouette burned into the screen. Fingerprints staining every letter. And the coffee. So much coffee there is to drink before I can rest.

Don't make me whole. Never even think it. Just love the pieces.

With the steady hands that brag of men. And the quaking ego of a child. Thoughtless in both act and presence. Every word wears corduroy pants. I hear it coming too long before it arrives.

Until we agree on our nothings.

And I gather the shards to begin again pasting my shell back together.

Like I never broke out of it. Or ever wanted to.

Thanx to RetMarut at Writers Network for the kind praise and cool link.

The internet needs more people like him and Billy the Blogging Poet who go out of their way to expose interested readers to unknown writers.

There were bar stools involved. Some lubricant. The higher we got the lower I sank. Until the bottom was so high up that I began to doubt whether I'd ever been there.

There's the ugly you keep inside yourself and there's the kind you're willing to let roam free. Pull on the pantyhose and unhook the leash. Until the alcohol is just a napkin to wipe up all the other shit.

I didn't have to try very hard to find someone willing to make it worse.

That's the best part about being a woman. There's always someone ready to take their place when they're tired of hurting you.

Strutting in the pitch black. Thinking I knew where it would lead. There was leather in every embrace. Stiff with the lives undressed.

Browsing the aisles. Shopping for my grief. Sales at every turn. Ammonia in their breath with every gasp I coaxed from underneath weighted skins. So many islands on their way to the other side of land.

I'm tired of daring the words to write me. It's time for some truth.

There are hours they've never seen. Lanterns masturbating to the chirp of the darkness. Fingers draw their maps inside my empty carcass. The chemicals in my brain throw their rocks.

Breaking all the windows in this haunted house.

As it looms from behind its pointed metal fence. Daring visitors indict its yawning mouth.

Nothing happened. Except sex. Closing my eyes so as not to see the act of myself being entered. The crocodiles in the moat still sleeping as that drawbridge finally came down.

All the uselessness in our gyrations. Animals lost in the fur we were shedding.

There was nothing left to love except myself. But I still didn't know how.

He tried to show me. I just didn't understand why.

Don't try so hard.

That cigarette will easily smoke itself. The phone will wait for you to answer it.

We finished our drinks. The vodka mine. The scotch his. The bartender snatched the twenty from under the tumbler. And we were free to leave. It was my turn to pay. I tried to, but he wouldn't let me. They're so generous until.

Don't tell. Ask.

Or pretend to want to know for the time being.

The thoughts sleeted in my head. Covering every thought in a layer of ice and discomfort. As if it'd never happened before. This curiosity. Lives hopelessly trying to live.

All the while I was imagining our skin mingling. Mixing into colors we'd never seen before. All the while I was waiting for him to measure the steps. Give me a number to wait on. A distance I could calculate.

It's not like we were really there. Like anything had happened.

We were just flaunting our binoculars.

Seeing how close forever could appear.

"And I find it kinda funny,
I find it kinda sad,
The dreams in which I'm dying
are the best I've ever had."
-Tears for Fears, Mad World

It's only Sunday. Dog ears in the carpet testify. What has happened. What isn't likely to occur again. Faded denim in his stare. Holes slowly finding their way through it. Zippers undone with a click of the tongue. Lips dressed in shades of forgotten. Necks wearing only music as the trust is drained from them.

He was finding himself anew and I wanted to follow, but I wasn't invited.

So I wished him well and turned my attention to myself. My corner. As it festers with words unfit for poets. Let alone people looking to be human.

Die again. Wearing the dirt as my nightgown. The flutter of a lullaby in his throat. When he would swallow. Trying to digest the meat of this darkness. It seems unreal, I know.

Maybe it is.

Scratched into a tender arm. Traces of a picture lost. Stabbed away by many strangers. I never had to leave because I was never there. Each hour in paper trays waiting for its ink. The line at the angle where the floor meets the bed laughing incessantly. In brutal echoes of clothes no longer there.

And I sighed, it's as right as it is wrong. It's always a yellow light. That choice is constantly there. Speed up or slow down. We're always deciding.

Usually it's effortless. But sometimes it lingers.

Shadows in the corridor that forget to follow them when they leave. Footsteps sing their chorus as the lock slides into place.

It's not a sad song. It was just too brief.

Turnstyles in the heart decorated with the fingerprints of passersby. A careless mosaic stolen from life's smallest pieces.

Decoding the fountain. Drip by drip. Through the water's skin the pennies blink. Copper eyes searching for the next wish.

Every breath is a cryptogram. Puzzles lodged between the answer's thighs. Picking up that scent of surrender. While I query the letters for their logic.

I turned the handle to the right until it stopped coming. Minute by minute I watched as those teeth slowly clenched.

It was broken. There was nothing to do except stop it from flowing. Every debate ended the same.

What now?

I'd always imagined I would change. Eyes ticking like a clock. Counting down from the first look to the last.

I think it was always broken. This just showed us how.

These words are not a mirror. They're a eulogy. There is no difference betweenn angel and demon except how we ask them.

When the stone is frayed all we have to remember it by is the grave.

And we kneel down in chapels made of paper while the rain comes down.

It's all about nothing. Dead things fluttering in the breeze. The doorknob on the dresser turning with the sunset. My sneakers walking in the shadow's steps. It's not real anymore. Poetry plays the heart's taxidermist. Moments frozen and mounted like caught fish.

It's all about nothing. The faucet's on, but the valve is shut. But the monkey still thinks he's dancing in the puddle.

It's about the words. Not what is. Nor what was. Tools only for creating something from nothing. Experience my marble. Thoughts my chisel as I cull the images from its veins. Always. It needn't be real now. Only to have been then.

Dredge the river until a new corpse is found. Doesn't matter whose it is. Because I need something to write about. I will find a way to feel even when everything is dead.

Stalin's eyes and Lennon's heart. The kitten with lion's claws. The hunt may take place in the backyard, but the prey ends up no less dead. So said the apron as it wore the chef. In sauces spilled and juices poured. Like metaphors drooling from the follies of poets. Naked under all that filth.

I built a kingdom out of maybe's. Stopped breathing that it might stand. Then someone came too close to me and my castle collapsed. It's no accident that there are 52 cards in a deck. The same amount of weeks in a year. It's wasn't desperation. It wasn't loneliness. It was just want.

I like alone. But I liked it better sometimes when you were there. It was all in the taste because there was never any nourishment. I was hungry throughout. I wanted you to make me better. But you only just made me want.

The kinds of things that we imagine life has in store for us. The sort of happiness that is believed to exist, though no one's ever captured it.

With every trap we set we only lose more of the bait.

Until.

I finally let the pigeon go. Free to deliver its message. All that time I shouldn't have been looking for the finish. It was the start I lacked.

When every sheet has fallen into place and still the blankets don't know where to go. I look out the window. Eyeing the streetlights as they waiver against all that darkness. And tell myself I made it too easy for them. Too hard for myself.

Because they got to go home again, but I never did.

Not because of any scarecrow. In fields less than green. Or any questions too dark to color in. Judas's with empty pens still writing on crumbling walls. The crucifix of having tried to love hanging heavy around my neck.

But unlike religion, in life, there is no sacrifice great enough to resurrect what is dead. Nor quench our sins.

All this time I thought my crown of thorns had roses on it. And just as with hell, heaven huddled somewhere inside the act of living.

That if I died enough I'd eventually be born again.

I wasn't wrong.

I just thought it would last longer than it did.

The angels looked down and I saw your face, but they wouldn't waitt.

now you're gone.

And if I want it back I don't know how to say it. Or that I even have the right.

To ask for what was never mine to begin with.

It was nothing like I thought it would be, but what ever is? Cold porcelain full of hot water cheats the skin. Into thinking it can feel movement from dead things. Or ones that never lived.

I hear the outside drawing in. Lights are everywhere though the sun's long since gone to bed. I'm anything, but dreaming, though my eyes are closed again.

We're at our best when we are our worst. When nothing matters I can see what once did. Blank mirrors letting me see what might've been. Every word I gave up to hear them. Turn the handle on this box and the songs still plays, but the jack never pops out of it.

There's glass everywhere, but nothing to see out there. Just more walls that keep shrugging as if they don't know.

And myself, with the most uneasy feeling that they never really did.

know me.

Heavy respites made of thunder. An open letter to myself. Words blossoming like atomic bombs. In my head cannons. In my voice only raindrops. There we are. Or were. Dogs without leashes. Thinking we were free at last.

Until what had kept us there decided it wasn't coming back.

An open letter. An envelope in which to send my thoughts. I was always looking for one. That what I needed was to get it there. Never considered it might've already arrived unnoticed.

In my head oceans. In my voice only islands.

I had every word there in my grip. Their triggers kissing my tongue. But why aim for a target that doesn't want to be hit. Feasting on lies that never quench this appetite.

It's so pretty in the gray. The spaces between now and then where I knew who she was. The color of her jeans at each stage of fading. From dark to light in hungry gasps. One thigh at a time strutting the breeze between her legs. I could count every wrinkle in her pockets as the change within would giggle as she danced.

Her ballet with the edge.

The smile in her frown always alive even when the power would go out. And we could only see each other by memory. Voices stalking absent shadows through defects in the silence. Without eyes. Without hands. Overwhelmed by the smell of the loss.

The better part of hunger behind us, we began negotiations with the other half.

The drunk guy came up to us and shook our hands. With a vodka smile and eyes made of gin. She watched as his lips fumbled with the words, but I had to turn my head. His life was too real for me to look at.

He said he had God and she said she didn't. And they each paused for a moment to pity the other for their own reasons.

Some times you're polite because you have to be. Some times because you're scared. But occasionally you're polite just because that's all someone needed.

The only thing missing was a clown in a party dress offering us slices of cheese. Life is never stranger than when it's real. And strangers are never real until you see yourself in them.

The smell of reality. Dead roses on the bureau. Fresh shirts inside. The charlatans in their smile. Festering canker in their corner of their promises. Dribbling out its pus. Until I was red enough. So sore. The demon in my backpack was quiet until I decided I didn't want to carry it any further.

The angel on my shoulder never said a word until I tried to brush it off.

Conscience is not the meter. It's the mark. To start by, but not to finish. And most of the evil we do, we do unto ourselves. For the most part.

Not broken by. Nor able to. Changing lanes. That's all we're doing. Some causing this vehicle to accelerate. While other force it to brake.

I imagine his thoughts. I was too young then. And now I'm too old. These caterpillars with their defective cocoons. Search the wind for butterflies that never happened.

Though we sometimes wish they could have.

They're not mine. And I'm not theirs. And it's unfortunate. Because sometimes that's all we want.

Is just to belong to someone else.

The religion of sound is merely a whisper. The truth in hearts is often a lie. And that is where we differ.

Oh yea, you can quote me on that.

It was dark blue at the edges. Broken grass upside-down growing. Sex without looking at the other person. Heavy breathing floating in tiny bubbles.

Until they burst.

If I'd had any place else to be I would've been there. Away from the chafe of the blankets. And the catatonic gaze of hungry nerve ends. If there was yellow anywhere else other than the corners of their eyelids as they close them to pretend we're not really there. Needles in our haystacks. Pecking at the darkness. Looking for some thread.

There was plenty to learn. So much to experience. The red dot in the corner that never went away even in the dark. All those little lies I told myself staring back. The carpet bristling with sheet music as we'd rub against it. A symphony of loneliness composed by the collision of empty skins.

Everything inside them finally finding its exit. Until all that had brought us together pulled us apart.

Some Grimm fairy tale. Ripe with poison apples. And wolves in human skins.

Saturns with big eyes. And moons it never saw.

Sad spectacles in close.
Languishing in their sight
as vision departs.

Capricious infatuations of
daunted robots. This cavalry
of drones saves nothing worthwhile.

The bed and the book
wait, for words to show;
blatant expectations
lie again, coloring in
those lines, one number
at a time; until we are

satisfied with our failures.

If it's finally over,
then we're better off,

now that we know
for certain,

what we're not.

The topic now being how. Time trembling like a bowling ball down that gutter toward your heart. I can pretend I'm her and use the third person. Arguing with myself puzzle piece by puzzle piece. Until every image is shaped to fit the destruction. Knowing too well how the second's been exhausted.

If I'm the first person and she is the third. There's someone between us. Some gasping transition between my admonishment and my revelation.

Were I better acquainted with praise I'd recognize it sooner.

Reveal to him the key to making it all easy is just admitting it never mattered.

Saying out loud that I was nothing. That I still am. To him. Swallowing every lie as darkness consumed the sunset.

Proving once and for all that change is temptation on its knees. Truth at its weakest.

Go on. Make me right again.

Pull the wings off of the fly and ask it what its name is.

Tell me the truth one lie at a time.

There are only Sundays if we have time enough. There is only loss when those ladders touch the roof.

Some kind of novel with characters all dressed in frown. She said. Some kind of sanity clawing at the ketchup on the slices of bread. She thought loudly in the dim light flattering her smile. As it fluctuated between smirk and grin.

Some kind of story wearing an old taffeta prom gown. Lost in nights almost happened. In places that don't even remember our names.

Everything there is to say wheezing like an iron lung. That it's so weak. So bound to its disease it takes everything just to turn it into language.

My happiness is counted in pennies. My life measured in refusals. She said. Under her breath.

I'm here, not because I want to be, but there never let.

Me in.

Peter being such an ugly angel. Those gates being so judgmental. As every explanation fails.

If heaven were I'd tell it I could do without. That's it's too hard to find. And so self-righteous.

Such is the appeal of hell. That it has no criteria. Let's everyone in.

And here I am. She intoned to herself. As she gracelessly took stock of the choices she had made. Bell, book and candle all one again.

Grin not withstanding the proverb.

She enjoyed being ugly, but not the consequences.

Forty-five degrees later she knew the name of the angle.

summaries incognito,
pink eyes turning brown
as we swayed, with the rhythm
of the loneliness...

our mutual inertia.

and it will all
come tumbling down,
in the fist of reality
it punches phantom
friends, with jaws
made of iron.

the pebble becomes the
boulder, as we are
drawn close to it.

we took off our capes
mid-flight, and waited for
the emblems on our chests
to prove their power;

in the choke of that
inertia, we lived
a lifetime of goodbyes.

Oh, it's a five beer phase. And I don't know how exactly it's different from the four kind other than mathematically. I still feel they're not there. Same as always. I still want to go back. Like nothing's changed. Even if everything has.

There's still a novel waiting to burst from my uterus. Like the child I'll never have. And I don't want sentences. Long, fruitless paragraphs. I want what I want. Something not the same.

Change the world. Not for the better. Not for the worse. Just show it, it still hasn't all been done. If it would only look.

She's younger than she feels. Older than she looks. Like all women are. Every word's as much a lie as it is a truth. Because we are. Or hoped to be. Each other's drug. Filling first the needle. And only after our veins swallowed the imagery. That emotion supersedes the narcotic we've let it become.

As hard as I try I can only remember what you told me then. That I was too lost to take advantage of.

I never knew I was lost until you pointed out how hard I had been to find.

I never thought rejection could be a compliment. Until I saw how much you'd risked just to say no to me again.

I've been writing in the morning. In the afternoon. Sober. Decent things. Rhetorical questions.

I've been telling them not to worry. Lying. Because what else is there to say when.

I was watching Capote and thinking about the new genre he invented. How little he had to do to change things. How he didn't have to try that hard to be great. He just let it have him.

And I wanted to write differently. A novel in poetry. No stanzas. No verses. But something not the same.

And how stupid it sounded.

I started to do it, but the tasks I create for myself are always larger than my ambition.

I wanted a best of in the sidebar. But how. If I can't stand to weed through all those words how could I ever ask that of anyone else.

Sometimes my self-esteem gets so low that it's high. And I know exactly what's wrong with me, but I don't desire to fix it.

All I want is to find a way to make people remember. To paste together a collage of words the world will won't want to forget. Fashion from the images in my head a new set of clothes for the world.

I choke down the comments like aspirin. But they don't take away the pain. I want to have a response. A life presrver. For the people who listen.

But it already seems too late to be anything other than an alcoholic poet.

Writing novels devoid of plots. Selling songs that never sing.

You're not deaf.

I just can't say.

What you want to hear.

I could write a novel. In poetry. I could do it.

And it would be as ugly as it was beautiful. But who would care at all.

What it had to say?

Who would even know if it had said anything at all?

She imagined the rivers under her skin. Without shores. The freedom they craved. The release she could give them. She'd always thought the world was alive only because she let it touch her. Perceived realities and all that.

The lion on the canvas roars because we are willing to hear it. We assign it that song. Anything or nothing could be coming out of its mouth.

It's what we want to hear.

Alone hadn't cost that much. $35 for a slice of solitude. $35 a night for the privacy one needs to kill themselves. A bargain by any standards.

She contemplated getting undressed. Filling the tub. She asked herself why she was there and wrote her answer on a crumpled piece of paper.

Not because I couldn't do it. I just don't see the point. Better to die alone than to live your life like that. I'm not frail enough to be a woman in this world.

The room didn't move as she skipped through it. Playing hopscotch with her suicide. Stone by stone. Counting the spaces.

When the rivers finally opened there was a smile on her face. She didn't know yet all the things she'd do. All the people she'd meet so many years later.

She sobbed quietly into the walls of porcelain wishing she could find more red, but not knowing how. Holding her wrist up to the flourescent and examining the depth of the wound. As that river she'd always imagined benignly trickled out.

If she had a time to die she wanted it to be then. But she couldn't have known how wrong she was. She'd never know until years later how much she still had to live.

How many people she'd yet to meet were waiting to know her.

It was a long walk to that empty room. Hacking at those wrists until nothing changed.

It was an even longer walk back to what I'd left.

We spent nine hours in the dark. (sort of) Twenty-four hours later we had light, but were otherwise cut off from the world. (for the most part) And it was all because of the mayonnaise. (it couldn't expire)

It had never been opened.

It's always been that the lights go out more than they come on. That wherever we go we make it so. Walking, talking power surges. Living, breathing blackouts.

While all around us the lights stay on. The living rages. In hacking coughs.

And we're the only ones without any symptoms, but I can feel the infection there in my thoughts. Breathing loudly as I try to remember what I wanted to say to them.

But I always forget.

And tell them it was nothing.

Because really it is.

Nothing.

Just one more hour added to the darkness. While we wait for the lights to find their way back on.

Trivial Pursuit with flashlights. Little pies made of plastic. And questions we can safely answer.

So long as it's dark.

Chapter 3

She wandered there in soft delusions. The world at the back of her throat. Some hiccup that had no expiration date. In a few years time I was old. Expelled from their club. Calculating how much he was older and not knowing who to blame.

I've always been less than careful with my medicines. Drawing in lines prescribed by false saviors.

I don't mean to be a junkie, but love is something drugs can't ever crouch. And we were lost long before. Or I was.

And you pretend. All your wedding gowns in bride's maid dresses. You want to be right.

But that's not us.

Chapter Two

We left there. And it was tomorrow. There were trees. Colored lights. Wrapping paper. Ungiven gifts.

We did what we always had. The same way we always did. Stars. Clouds. Not talking.

I've always liked being awake when the prospect of tomorrow is swallowed up by today. Illusion colliding with reality. One bottle after another.

How it changes, but it never does.

Our lives chasing their tails like untrained puppies.

We left there and met up later on. The deer was still in my eyes, but a few beers later it was gone.

I remember watching him pack his things. Delaying my own departure to better remember how he looked. His half-assed jokes. His techie wisecracks. And thinking that I didn't want to start something new. And at the same time knowing it had already begun.

I could've said no when he first asked. And I almost did. It was such a bizarre request.

But all in all, I think I made the right decision.

Well, maybe not right, so much as, the one I can best live with.

We left there. Dirty stools still fresh in our memories. The words of drunks our surest wisdoms. We left there thinking ourselves different, but knowing we'd failed.

We said to each other that we'd never look back.

But I did.

Chapter One

I didn't know why I was there. Other than to meet him. Everything happened while I watched. Trying not to be in the way. Everyone ate their sandwiches. Drenched in mayonnaise. Shuffled in salt and pepper. While I tried to recall my breakfast. Stale wheat chex in an ocean of skim milk.

I had on my ugly jeans. The ones I wore when I just didn't care. The ones that were too tight at the waist and too wide in the thighs. And a grey long sleeve t-shirt with Yahoo emblazoned on the chest.

It was June.

His shorts ran down his legs as he walked. Carrying heavy, empty boxes. His cellphone sounded like he was expected. Waited on.

And my thoughts hesitated for a moment as I was forced to overhear.

But something told me that didn't matter.

I still don't know why I was there. Other than to meet him.

We watched some porn for a while before creating our own. It was fine. Like slipping a dollar into one of those machines and getting back four quarters. We'd broken even.

Again.

I'm not a gambler. It's never appealed to me. But I like the aspect of risk. Especially when it's something I'm prepared to lose. Like love.

I've never believed in the concept that once it's given it's ours to keep. Which is why I've never like it that much. The love they give to us is theirs. To distribute or withhold in any way they see fit.

The sheets were cold from the air conditioning. And I was terminally unable to find the volume setting on the amplifier loud enough to block out the world and still low enough for us to hear each other.

We'd been in his car only minutes earlier. Noticing how the headlights stroked the neighbors window. Some malignant massage raping his tv while we pondered another walk up the stairs. To change our dollar bills.

He seemed to say I was inaccessible as he fiddled with the buttons on the cd player. I'd always thought it, but now I had evidence. I wanted to blame him. I knew some of it was his fault, but then I remembered how sure I'd been about everything up until

It couldn't have mattered more. Couldn't have mattered less. To have you there pretending to want me as the truth broke those rubberbands on the backs of our masks.

Wasn't he correct when he observed how wrong everything is. All the time. In every way. People always seem to want to go backwards.

I hopped out of the room under the pretense of getting us beer. Like a rabbit who'd been the victim of someone's good luck. I just had to get out of that box. It felt so much like a coffin. His breathing shallow as his eyes lazed on my arm. Studying the ink that had left poor charlie with a permanent scowl. His scream in thick black letters just over his head. Just as I always suspected mine were. Especially as times like that one. Where every exhale quaked like an avalanche.

He said I made him different. Not better. Just different.

You're not different. You're lonely. And now you have proof.

If we're here. If we really are and this is not some strange dream, even still, we'll wake up at some point.

And it will all be over.

Sad eyes on the threshold. Counting the freckles on her arm. We wrote on the same page for a while. Different inks. Different handwritings. Trying to find complete sentences in the pieces we had left to spare.

It's not as if we had plans. Or anyone we knew how to love more than ourselves.

Just tigers waiting for our claws to grow back. Semicolons drowning between oceans of thought.

The beauty of it was that we never had to be lost or found. We just laid down for a while. Letting the grass grow around us.

The best part was we didn't do anything. Just let it all happen. Little grains of sand waiting on the lightning strike to change us into glass.

The journey for me wasn't about going somewhere. It was about discovering where I'd always been.

Threading the needle is easy compared to making those stitches.

I've only lived occasionally. By choice as much as by circumstance.

There's no regret in what's happened. Only it what could have.

And then he tells me he sees neon where I stare. And the storm gets close enough so that we have to ask.

Was it only words.

Borderline.

The temperature on the floor is cold enough for me. The eyes in their fingers see too much. So many microscopes in every touch. Too close to see the whole.

I can't accept a smile I can't see as nice a gift as it is. Words. I already have too many of them. Pale impostors dressing up in the skins we've molted. Give me something real. A broken bone. A skinned knee. Something I can feel.

Not cars with eyes too bright peering through the glass. Not voices from machines that pretend people are there. Not jailcells on the ceiling that hold the shadows prisoner.

Don't tell me I can write. I know this. Because art belongs to the defectives. The ones who can see through the window, but can't walk through the door. Life is a house. It has a ceiling. And a basement. Life is a place. We can stay or we can leave it.

Life is a house made of glass. I can always see in. Always see out. That's what makes it so hard to know where I stand.

Sometimes it feels like they're still there. Ghosts under the skin. Asking me how I think I should feel. Questions at every corner. Ninety or more degrees of decision. Choices I can't make if you give me choices.

We're always alone. Just sometimes someone will let us forget. Rip the petals from that rose and off only the stem.

And there they are like blankets swimming in the sheets. Not knowing where to go. Not certain of the idfference between islands and oceans.

Find ourselves in every audition. It's all a show. The lines on the paper telling me to say what I never would..

I catch their desire at its tail end. And it seems like they could want more.

The fruit so rue. Just wait.

Give it time to fall.

We're still not old enough, but we've always been too young. To know what we almost had.

I'd never be able to sleep if I didn't believe it was right.

What I see from my perch if usual only the end.

I used to ride because it felt like flying. The wind carrying my every movement. Muscle alive with the strain of finding touch. The outside will never match what's within. Get used to it.

Can't breathe out until first you take the air in.

I thought your words were only an afterthought. A means to an end. Soft sidewalks memorizing our footsteps.

And then I looked back and you were almost there. Sun looking for its clouds.

I had to run before I could learn to walk. Get away from everything to know what should be kept.

Even if it's nothing. There's still what I remember.

I wish I had some place else to go. Someone else to blame besides myself.

But it's such a rare condition to actually know what you want.

The sheets will testify. But the darkness will judge. Risk versus threat as we imagine ourselves living again.

One lie at a time. Until the horizon finally allows us to get near enough.

To say we were there.

To prove to our hearts that we were that close.

Cheating the inputs. From wall to lips. The wires chasing across the floor like dead snakes. As I dig for any life that might be left in their carcasses. Chewing on my thumb. Giving up some skin seems a reasonable trade for having a bit of someone else's.

The old man peered at my chest with astonished eyes. Yes, that's what it says. Though most people don't notice at all. Another shirt draped loosely over rather unremarkable mounds of flesh.

Following the walls. The secrets they keep safe within. Little truths that would slip out from my fingers after we'd left the bed behind. It feels better now to remember than it did to live it. Not because it was bad. Just that it was difficult. Every minute together a morbid decision not to care too much. Sitting on the thinnest branch and just waiting. Always waiting for it to snap. More concerned with when it would end than what was actually happening.

You're never old enough to love someone. You're either too old or too young. If you look both ways before crossing it'll never happen.

If you don't, you may wish it never did.

I can't sing. Never could. So I listen. To their songs. The music they make as they pluck my strings.

It can't all be gone. I know it isn't. Even if there are only freckles left. When everything goes dark I see so much better how bright it was.

And it doesn't seem lost at all. Just waiting to begin again.

Serpents with metallic tongues sucking the connections from the walls. Until we can feel something new.

Tell me how it was in electric voices. Stereo massage. That feeling of your eyes under my skin. Layer upon layer in fast forward. Bird without wings. Our faith belonging to what we were assigned to believe in. Our hearts skipping rope to the exhale of the sun. Looking to build ladder where stairs once stood. Trying to dig up the graves that stole our corpses.

I hear the song, but it's so far away. I try to wake up, but it only makes it fuzzier as I try to focus on what isn't there.

Wearing those lies. like pantyhose. Too close to the skin. Promising my thumb tomorrow won't hurt as much And it doesn't heart me. The lies that I tell it.

Are you free now. Wherein the barbed wire is the fence. I tried to show you how, but it wouldn't talk.

Not like it used to.

A million restarts and still we can't connect.

All I ever wanted was not to be alone. Was not to feel like this.

You rescued me from so many things. But you couldn't save me from myself.

Every cure you gave me only made it worse.

Turning over in your jeans. Thought to your connection thwarted. An alchemist's smirk spilling from the veins of an optimist. It's not where we're taken. It's where we never went. Squeaking swings abandoned on the playground where the possibility first kicked. I hear the laughter in your sadness. See the gratitude in your goodbye. Tortoises without their shells dressed in the hare's clothes again.

If I were newer. If I could keep that star from moving away. If I only had your naivete. Your faith in the struggle. Could see myself in its rearview. And know that I was the one chasing it.

I always knew you were an answer. I just never knew which question you belonged to. You were colors. So many of them thundering like fireworks through the darkness. So impossibly alive, but only for a moment.

And then gone. Lost to the same fire that gave them life.

You were. Are. The dream I always wake up in the middle of.

Thoughtless tomorrow on my doorstep as yesterday bends down to tie its shoe.

I go, but not because I wanted to leave. I go because I don't belong here.

Some stairs take you up. Others only take you down.

And you've always known where I was going. With or without you.

I can't tell you I'm all right. So I don't say anything at all. I can't tell you how I feel. So I leave these messages. Drunk cocoons stumbling for their butterflies.

And nothing I try seems willing to change me for more than a little while.

Cold detergent smiles. Laced with bleach. And additives. Washing away the meat. Leaving behind only the skeletons. Shadow after shadow promising someone in that empty parking space. Some reason for the trenches between the slats in the blinds. As the ceiling shudders against every exhale of the night.

I would've composed something last night except the paper was all I had. Paper and beer and tamazapam in ugly doses as technology disinherited its only child.

We wait.

For what?

We don't know, but still we wait because the waiting convinces us that it knows.

I tried to write with pen. With paper. With beer and tamazapam. Waiting on the high like a teenager at graduation. Drowning in the throes of tradition abused. Underneath the gown, that's where I want to look. The zipper at the back of their necks. That what I want to pull.

No speeches. No choreographed tosses.

Just the future they never warned us about. And the package it's left us.

In cardboard boxes that don't seem even close to big enough.

4:23am still nothing.

Hours measured in years. I taste you and don't know if I'm only remembering. Or that I ever knew.

How near you were. Or right it might've been given other circumstnaces. In the end we are nothing more than choices to one anohter. Yes's and No's. What does not or will later matter most.

My choice was an easy one, but yours, I don't think I could make it. So many reaons for you to love what you already have. So many reasons for you to love what you don't.

Isn't it over when we admit that we love each other. And there's nothing we can do but let go.

Finding the dark like a second skin. Digging up the tears like another pair of wings.

I understand if you don't want to see.

When it's dark I am powerless. Or is it dark because I am. I'll never know for certain until the day I learn to survive without these things that fill my waiting graves with imposter deaths. Dying like a comet does. Falling the only flight there is. Spitting on gravity for the brief moment that these paper wings please the wind.

I've not forgotten, just don't want to admit, that I still think about what this day means.

Camping out in the wilds of my own home. Conversations with disembodied voices. They only understand the choices they offer. No other responses. Just like anyone does.

Don't try to say it differently. Just answer with what they want you to say. It's dark in here and I'm waiting for a truck. A man with a ladder to come and reattach the wires that used to carry my voice from here to there. In quiet sighs that never bothered anyone. Small flashlights vying against the absence of all those many streetlamps.

We live in the wilderness. Of the mind. Thick jungle lit up like stadium. Until that battery dies.

2:23am and still not a sound. Just movies watched by no one that so resemble ones I've already seen. This came before, but no one noticed. The poetry is gone from imagination.

No one sees it. Or cares if they do.

I can't hear anything when it's this quiet. All that silence gets in the way. Life is loud and obnoxious. A tether ball game of bruises skin never shows.

There's a window in every question. And broken glass in every answer.

Six hours. Maybe seven.

Or longer.

Can't complain when mercy is in the hands of another.

On the prowl. For moments to use me. Put me on inside out like soiled panties. Filthy mistakes still clinging to their ass like the toilet paper from public bathrooms.

It's fair enough. Don't you think? Just that we knew each other. For that one second when we were both so tired. So wasted. Cobbled stones falling into their holes. Part sidewalk. Part highway. Engines grinding as their oil leaks. Going everywhere and no place. Because destinations are for suckers and people who might someday actually get there. Wherever it is we think we want to be.

Like all the pretty flowers in the field. Kissing the ass of the sun. They all die too. Nut just not us.

Not just me.

It's just a dollhouse full of tiny plastic people. Carefully contrived ethnocentric families. The baby in the cradle. The momma in the kitchen. They never grow up. Never get older. Never ache for things beyond their molded finger's reach. They are what they have. And what we want them to be. Like everyone we try to pose. Dare to touch. Imagine owning.

Making their little beds as if those small rooms will grow to fit all the things we need to put in them.

I'm always fooled by the working lights. The recorded sound. Dollhouses everywhere. Full of people still bigger than me.

I talk to myself so much. Drink after drink becoming the friends I can't seem to keep.

Tearing the cellophane from the mouth of the decision. Ugly, brown and burnt. The fetid progeny of green eyes turning grey.

Eligible tragedies. Are what I make from life.

Stencilled skin. Color after color stalking the veins they once kept hidden. A scream permanently drawn on the face of an angel. A tear charred into the eyes of a child. Woken up late at night by the stench of a life I swallowed, but couldn't keep down.

Fluid and amber as the night rolled us over and chased its way inside. Another moment gone sour as we hesitated to drink it in.

His eyes played tennis with the question. Darting back and forth as I tried to focus on his nose. Too small for his head. The net was always there, but suddenly I saw it for the first time. When his last lob struck it, paused a second and then fell limply to the ground.

I stopped listening after that and just got on with the hurting. Learning the sound of the breaking branch. Memorizing the oratory of the silence. Little birds swarming in my head as I dug deeper into the flesh. Looking for things that were never there.

Every reason for making that journey was gone. I found so much in the skins they wore. But was so disappointed when I found nothing below it.

Paper dolls. At the mercy of someone else's scissors.

The closer we get the more alone we are.

I know this because he showed me.

The whisper is how the heart screams. When we've nothing left to be except ourselves. As useless to each other as a kiss is to a prostitute.