It was the nine of diamonds. Rows of cartoon robot eyes staring up at her. Unblinking.

She found it on the floor when she finally extracted herself his arms to procure a cigarette. The rest of the cards laid comfortably in their stack on the nightstand. The two halves put back together after their game.

It was the nine of diamonds on the floor. By itself. Juxtaposed against an argyle sock. His.

What it meant. That was anyone's guess she thought to herself as she flinched the flame out on the zippo. His heavy breathing still populating most of the neurons in her skull. Popping and cracking like dirty vinyl spinning awkwardly under a delicate needle. As the music sputters out in disjointed spasms. Like the last drops of water farting out from a dried up well.

The nine of diamonds. So unspectacular she mumbled to herself as she followed one of its corners back into his embrace. To listen a little longer to the sound of the blood playing hopscotch inside his chest.

she was ready with her pebble.

To play again.

It's almost time. Chin to knee listening to the waves crash in my head. Gone. Gone. They're gone again. They never wait long enough after I leave so that I may come back.

It's almost me. In the grin the window wears when its raining. Orange fingerprints of light pressing against the heavy sigh of the glass. As it listens to my words choking down their punctuation.

It was so many years ago. The girl always with the broken ladder in her throat. Waiting on a voice that couldn't escape.

It's always time. Dirty hair caught in fractions of itself. The tug of reality dragging down my pants. Anxious thoguhts draw their bath.

Connecting the red dots that lead back to mirror.

Why is it dark?

Because it is.

From through these bent eyes. This deformed vision I see clearer now. The prospect of the habit. The promise of destruction burning a long wick. In tired arms limp with fading friends. The corner's there. Where it should be. Caught in the angle of our intuition. We say we're changing, but we're just saying it. Letting everything else move away from us. While we stay behind. Saying it was never real.

When we know it was. It always is.

As distorted as I see things. As ugly as every word becomes. When there's no one left to love except myself. Pale child on her black horse discarding the saddle.

Has it been long enough yet? Can we hate ourselves now? Start this dying. Turn all those lies over to them and live without. The rooster waking us up. The cloak on the back pedal.

The terminal in your thoughts as you tried to be young again.

Well, we almost were. There was a crack in the sublime just as you began to turn over the first leaf. I saw it. It waited for you to grab hold, but you hesitated.

And then it was gone.

Memory. Humor. Petulant providers of the ghosts. Deliberate as the toil of the quiet searching my veins. Gears unwrenched in a spectrum of impotent rages. As futile as all things are afterwards.

In the chimney of his lungs as the grunting progresses toward an inevitable end. There is no fire. Only the leftover smoke. There is no such thing as intimacy. Only stabbing. Harder and harder at the hole in me he cannot fill. Blind haystacks flaunting needles that no longer exist.

Not what I lack. Nor what is still mine. But what I wanted that they could give. The weighted gaze of careless eyes as they examine the temporary shelters under my skin. The crisp jerk of nirvana in that moment where the mind pauses to let the pleasure consume itself.

The bitten nails in our throats as we tried to swallow.

No more words. Or lovers.

Just the rattle of the empty bed. The density of broken glass filling out those wounds.

Hours later. By design. The ugly perpetuating. Mastubrating against the rumple in my brow. Born biting my nails. Gnawing at the parts of myself the world might touch.

The pillow at the back of his throat cushions my silence in its awkward way. So that I can hear it, but it doesn't hear me.

The pretty in the lie advising us. The rooster in his smile finally waking us.

And we are words again. That I have never spoken. Thoughts that break in tenuous waves. Against walls older than my first love of strangers.

It's always wrong. The moon in the wolf refuses to rise.

Needlesss algorithms choke your look. As you pause to listen to yourself.

The syntax of the heart still undefined.

Lost in thoughts that may refuse us. A product of what we could've been.

The damage. It knows all the hiding places I've forgotten.

The damage, it tries to change us. Fleshing out all the lies we had started to tell ourselves.

I'm always trying to backup what isn't there anymore.

Begin with an outline and slowly fill it.

No. I said. Guts first. Then add the skin.

We were both wrong.

You start with nothing. And you're never finished.

The paper bites my fingers as I draw the map of its new veins. Prying out every valve. Breaking every thread. Deconstructing every domino. Undoing each chain. But the shadows are always there. From where the towers stood.

Waiting to fall.

To be wrong as well as I can. To start with nothing. And to never be finished. Ugly as the last words we ever spoke to each other. Dark stairs in my empty hands catching the back of his walk. In down. In the freedom that is loss. Folding the dagger into the wound it has found, but didnlt start. Where the limp in my speech finally snags your thoughts.

We are there for the first time. And the last.

Build the frame. Then sober it in.

No. Gather the meat. And give it back to its flesh. Different phases of the skeleton. Finding its shape. Different profiles in the vanity's mirror digging. Digging their graves. As if it matters where we bury what is dead.

We were wrong.

Again.

The silence spoke in words too big. The best thing about life are the detractors. Hate makes me believe love is real. As real as the way skin puckers by the temperature of the room. Rising to greet the cold. Shrinking from the heat.

Mimicking the mind in its reactions.

That somehow this meat is a metaphor for its mind. Some stolen puppet languishing on the ends of rotting strings.

That these toothpicks do more than simply prop up my pelt. Both fearing life and worshipping it as gods would speculate from their throne. About the things that could make us real. And the seldom things that actually do.

Should you ever find yourself alive again wake me up. Terrify me with hope.

That every death brings us closer.

We're never too old to hate ourselves. Or the things that failed us.

She opened up her cellphone. The backlight reminded her of sex. The low murmur of that electricity usually dormant thoughtlessly coming alive from beneath her skin.

For her to see what buttons to press.

The ocean was loud at the back of her neck. Her yellow bike breathed quietly against the saline wind. People passed. So many people. And she noticed how they didn't notice her. Imagining herself sinking into the wall she sat upon; becoming as red as it.

Concrete.

Something soft left alone long enough to become hard.

She tapped in each number one at a time rather using the memory function. Imagining she was karmicly whispering in his ear.

Pick up.

She looked and saw the sky scarred with clouds. She was leaving home in an effort to find it. Wheels couldn't take her there. Only footsteps could negotiate the path she had in her head. Of leaving without being gone. Touch without skin. Truth without exception.

She didn't want to die. Not then. But she did want to die. Some time soon. Under a sky as dark and as bright as this one.

As shattered as her.

Or at least pretending to be.

Until the next storm.

She thought as she examined every crack in the clouds, someday my secret will be told by the the thickest branch on the nearest tree.

Someday I will make myself small enough to spill through those holes that are always there in the sky when I look up.

The marble sky sick with its own force. Waiting for questions I won't ever ask again. The clouds draw their maps in the shades of storms still to come. The horizon pressed deep into the cleavage of the moon. Suffocated by what saves it.

There we are. Frail again.

Fixing everything that's broken with duct tape and rubber bands.

Everything's temporary.

Everything's wrong.

Even after all those clouds are gone.

If you enjoy writing fiction there's a new
short fiction contest at Clarity of Night.

I've read through past contest entries and found them to be of a very high caliber. So even if you don't want to enter be sure to stop by for the great reading.

We're not there anymore. Thighs clenching taut on bottles sucked dry. The ink in the thought straining to get out. Scoping the path of the valve by the momentum in our want.

Never to be that eager again. All those viruses infecting our hearts actually doing us good. There once was no breaking. No wrong to be done.

Only the long way and the short to get to where we should be. Tress everywhere disparaging our ability to spot the forest.

Falling. Without a sound.

None needed.

To prove we had hit bottom.

Found each other. For the last time.

There's no middle of the night here. Just driving. Lots of driving. No one getting anywhere. The stores all sell whatever you could want, but only if you can get there before they close. And can still manage to find a free parking space.

They're always taken even though there's nowhere left to go.

Just drive.

Finding myself in the lurch of the road. And the hush of the engine. As they pull us closer to the end.

Going so many places with no means to take them with us when we leave.

The wink of the lock takes me back inside. The darkness insinuating I am alone.

The night begins. And it ends. But it has no middle anymore.

Cupping the hour in my hands as it spills from the faucet. Rinsing. Constantly rinsing away that filth.

He used to try to cure me. With prescriptions made of glass. Why are you not happy? Am I the cause?

No.

He used to troubleshoot me. Program by program. I'd tell him I was not broken.

I'd tell him happiness is not my measure. Not my source.

He'd say I was faulty. In need of repair.

I just got tired of arguing.

Don't you know you're not happy either. Don't you know you're far more lost. All the things you use as a an anchor are not as strong as the pull of your heart.

All the things we tell ourselves when no one's there won't find us when we're lost.

He wanted to make me better. Like a child compulsively wants to connect those dots. Find a picture in that madness.

Sometimes there's no picture taken.

Just faces we can't identify. Skins that don't want to fit.

He only succeeded in making himself worse.

The act of caring hurts us all.

If you want to save someone then make it yourself.

Twelves steps to not knowing who I was.

To being her.

He pastes the words to his forehead. Carefully cutting each one from the glue. Weighing the adhesive with a finger in the taste. So abundant with fructose are the desperate.

I trip through the darkness on feet made of clay. The light in my hand hiding more than it shows. As my stride shapes itself to mimic the paths I've taken. Creating doorways in the walls I once trusted.

There's an amplifier hooked up to everything I've never said.

But the speakers still wait.

Every time I thought it done there it began. Cold wrists scoping the blade. Highways mapped in blood. Not to live. Only to die better if I can.

I said I didn't know and he told me I should.

Like the rain always knows exactly where to land. And the sharp always chirps before it tries to burn us.

Swallowing the thought of never knowing you again. One skip at a time the record limps onward.

Until all those songs have been played.

If I could tell you how to feel I would.

Every fucking day. You write something. Talk to yourself. Thinking you're actually listening. You make your little sites. CSS running amok. Tin foil tigers on plastic dishes. Not sticking. Layers. So many layers floating against the margins. Pretending they know how deep the page is. When you look away. Or resize the instrument. Cold letters stripped of their alphabet. Just words now. Fishing for bait.

Empty hooks.

The color of your lens. The length of your flash. All the things that take the pictures not set. Still waiting to learn what sort of image you wish for them to create.

Solid like you thought you wanted. But was so heavy.

Or empty. Like it really is. Slung over your shoulder like a fake prada handbag. Just to make you look like you are trying.

The drugs pulling your hair back so they can see your face.

the outside of our in's
debating how
to get there

the candy shell
on his words
not preventing

the chocolate
from melting
in my fist

not sorry
not anything

We're closer now. To the edge. The drama wears us well. As aching legs spread to receive the favor of hating ourselves. The keys are soft. In the lock. Hesitantly opening the door. The desk is sharp against my wrists. Chasing metaphors that no longer apply. We're all over. All done.

Writing poems to ghosts. Because I have to write to someone.

Just a parody of myself. The only exception gone. The clown in a human mask. Waiting to be laughed at. Hurrying to make a joke of myself before they can.

It doesn't hurt. It just keeps asking why it doesn't anymore.

I don't know how it should feel. I just know it shouldn't feel like this.

So many sails gasping for the wind. But they have so many holes.

We're closer now.

There's a sad little girl in the heart of every woman. Sobbing softly under the cloak of sex. Demanding love as the price for her flesh. Unsure of how she could purchase it otherwise.

Still not there.

Don't want to be.

Pretty enough.

I was chain smoking because our night had ended too abruptly. Paused at that moment when he'd peeled time's dense skin from my bones. Waiting for him to come back and press play.

I was diving for the bottom to find a way out. Ever since the way I'd come in had changed the locks.

Too tired to beg. I just asked. Too naked to care I just waited for the darkness to offer me its clothes.

I may have waited too long.

So many apples to count. Both fallen and picked. So ripe and pleading to be bitten. Like we always are. Muted skins throbbing with the meat below. We wait. Are always waiting. To be tasted.

Like we always are.

Discarded.

Maybe it was always too late.

Those quaking demon didn't seem much threat at all. As the situation surrounded us. With too much time to discover ourselves, we found out more than we wanted to know. Broken stopwatches in every embrace.

I didn't have an hour. Didn't even have a minute. To gather my clouds. Show you how well I can rain. For the amber in the fossil. For the satisfied in your routine.

I keep wanting to be caught. Still always trying to escape. The sober of the headboard reminds me of where I am. Imagining they could move me.

Cut into this cocoon and find the caterpillar changed.

We do laugh. Thick eyes painting the glass. On those broken windows. We listen as if we know how to care about anyone else. Maybe we want to, but can't remember.

Dreams struck by the fist of the alarm. Sleep is over. And we have to see again.

Pick up the chisel and drill at the slab. Dig out the shapes it keeps from us. Why do we ever sleep when we could be spending that time listening to each other breathing. Remembering how the needles shallowed my skin. Until every river I had drowned in was empty.

It always mattered too much.

Writing eulogies for every thought. Children finding the first traces of frailty in their parents. Widows at the edge of the grave.

We do have our moments. To be content. With what we are. With ramshackle lovers on slopes too steeps. With bargains made after the act.

In soft pillows of clay. The weight of our hearts makes its impact.

We do laugh.

At everything. Especially when the crying won't do.

They cracked the autumn open. Its broken yolk spilling everywhere. The yawn of the moon their only clue about where they were. How long since.

She bent down on chafed knees to force herself to look up at him. The petty of the moment sweating loud in her ears. As she filled in her answers to the questions still left.

True or false she wondered as she tripped on the difference.

He said he was lost. Broken ladders at every ascent.

Who isn't? So what?

We build our stairs from stumbles. At least until we've fallen far enough.

We stalk the zombies for as long as those graves are still fresh.

Scouring their skin for what it means to not be alone.

I guess I don't scrape that hard.

I'd only had half a drink and somehow it was enough to quench the need for resilience. Fortify my mind to step where I would leave no footprints. Pulling on the elastic in his grin until snuggly it surrounded me. A perfect drowning either way.

If it was just the sober beating its drum again, I didn't care. The cadence suited us. Slow, snoring touches that would choke if we got too near.

I'd only just begun being her. Arrogant flower with its shattered stem. The slope of the darkness dominoing as we talked. It should've just been sex. Bodies without names coughing out their loneliness. In fists of mucus much too sure. That the disease is all we are.

It should've been so many things it was.

I breathed in the fire too long. Now I don't know how to live on only oxygen.

Who needs to live anyway when there's so much dying to be done.

the best lovers
are the ones who
know you won't
always be their's

everything used

people, self
diction, substance

its strength
determined by
our weakness

i know why people
tend to sleep at night
and not in the day

because they want to
know what they're doing
to themselves and what's
being done to them

they want the sun
on their skin like
tiny fingers tracing
what draws them in

they want to be born
in light and die in
darkness

but that's seldom
how it happens

I think it will always be like this. But then I always think that whatever the situation. A visionary I am not. I see what's right there. So right in our faces that most people don't notice. I see the details. The subtleties of the moment. All I have is the closeup.

Sometimes it's helpful. A lot of times it gives details you were better off not knowing.

Without the big picture. Without the foresight it's hard to imagine myself ever being different than I am right now.

I do change. I just never see it coming. No time to embrace it if it's good. No chance to stop it if it's not.

Lately the future seems more urgent. Like it's not as far away as it used to be. I squint and stare, but still can't focus. On what's out there. Or if anything is.

Normally this wouldn't matter, but lately it feels like there's something waiting for me to find it.

And I just can't get far enough away from myself to see it.

We'll never know why we were there. Or ask again. To try those aprons on for size. Stains and all. So many drinks just to be sober again. The rush of the mountains crippling my sprint. As we laid down into each other with every intention of waking up.

There are not enough dreams.

Nothing I can take with me after I've woken up.

And no one's there.

There is patient skin. That turns its rubber bands into palette. Stalwart brushes try to show me how wrong I was. Looking to find. Or to put color into those empty spaces.

There is no cost in telling them. Giving breath to that sigh. I do it so easily. Sneeze out that last bit armor. Submit to what I almost was.

His fingers everywhere. I wanted to stop him. But I;m not that different from the people I condemn.

Coaxing rainbows from the little colors that are left.

In what I've become.

With a million reasons to let it go. I cling to the one that promises it's not over.

Every eye has it's way of showing what must be seen.

wake me up when I'm young again and tell me we're still together.

He wanted to know what I saw. So I showed him. Purple eyelids. Broken irises. The ugly in his stare swelled into acceptance. I couldn't stay.

I didn't want to, but I still asked that worthless question. Why we were there. If we'd ever be there again. It was hard at the time not to want what seemed such a reasonable demand.

He had asked to know what I saw. Begrudgingly I'd agreed to show him. Thirsty pens. Torn paper. Windows that only see in.

The measure of a life is in who still measures it. And when no one does I feel better. Not having to believe they're actually my friends.

I tried not to imagine, but couldn't stop myself. So many corners to turn. His eyes promising me a place in a world that had never offered one.

He didn't say anything anyone else hadn't. To make failure sound like success. He just said it in such a way that I was willing to lose again.

It's my fault.

And it's also yours.

I've never been broken. But I'll always be incomplete.

Doused in the sunset the headlights' nostrils flared. Wheezing with a trampled vision. They couldn't see any further than we did.

He never said he was different. I just assumed. As anyone might when the confronted with someone they want. No real reason. Other than a need to see a green light where there had always been red.

It's not like there was anything down the road to catch. Just more road to eat up our pace. The anvil on my back as I tried to look him in the eye. Tell him I only wanted to go back to when all my lovers were inside my head. Before I needed help from any kind of medicine to sleep. To write. To speak.

To be certain that I was alive.

And writing was my privilege. Not my burden.

There in the porcelain he slept. Waiting for the mold. Hands to the lullaby tremoring. With the words we'd waited on. Since we began.

We have lived So now what will we do.

We have stolen feathers from the antlers of the hawk. As in flight we let it see our awe. Gaping mouths waiting for the piss.

I asked myself what I wanted. Soft fingers relenting their grip. I just sat there wishing I could be anyone else. Anyone who was never me.

I don't suppose there's any kind way to say that I can't. Won't remember anymore. Whatever it was that changed the coax of the grey. While I would wait for time to forgive all the moments I had put aside.

So many questions I could ask, but no answers I'm willing to hear.

I'm so tired of us trying to be ourselves.

Determined to succeed at this failure. Dressed in someone else's clothes. Bathed in someone else's scent. There is perfume in the lies we tell ourselves. There are flower to be grown in this stoic bed.

I tried to wear them and was always worn by. So I changed my plan. Pounded the shoes until they fit. Not taking into account where I planned to walk in them.

So maybe my nose gets red because my glasses are too old and they don't fit right anymore. But it's still my face. And it's still my nose. Holding up the sight I wasn't fortunate enough to have been born with.

I think of the words we used to say. Little daggers stabbing at giant carcasses. Always telling ourselves we're hunting what's hunting us.

Putting our hurt into those fleshy envelopes. And wondering why it always comes back to us undelivered.

Folding the paper lengthwise until the numbers disappeared. There we sat with the shoehorn under our asses.

He brushed my hair back and tried to see what I did. That was close enough.

The kitten's claws are sharper than the cat's. That's what we always forget. When the need overcomes. And blankets fray under the rhythm of our ache. I count the threads.

And promise myself there will be somewhere to sleep soon.

Everything I think I know always knows me bather. I search for the seams in its trenchcoat. Thinking my fertility lies in knowing.

How alone I am.

Driving my blind dashboard. Fishing for what's in the road.

in the way
we see everything
steeped in loss,

sour with dates
we'd thought forgotten

so unusually romantic
as is every broken heart

left to cure

The magnet under my skin throbs. Something opposite must be near. The tunnel in every word moans. The dark yawning loud. There wasn't a pencil in his hand, but there was one in his look. The act of trying to remember knotting his stare. The ways in which we distinguish here from there are the only reasons we ever let them leave us. Always striking the tops of these mountains with our tiny hammers. Enlarged by how small we've made the pieces of this giant.

Always unsure. Toes teasing the water. I watched him dress himself and grew used to the clothes. Quickly forgetting the skin. That feeling of submerging myself in someone else. The tension on their surface keeping me down.

He said he'd be back, but I knew he wouldn't. It's just one of those lies we have to tell. It takes more courage not to come back. Sneak inside that costume. Discarding all those other skins.

Dwarfed by the burst of permanence afterwards. I can't help taking things apart just to see if I can put them back together again. It's my best and my worst trait.

All the things I once thought I couldn't live without are gone.

And now I know I was right.

I couldn't tell you why it is this way. Only how it is. The details you might lose to your self-importance. The doubled sword with just one blade. Attempting to open up lives already undone.

The coffin. All dressed up with paper dolls. So well trimmed. Paper cuts at every taste. My tongue an accordion. So many openings in what was said.

I try to be a person, but I only end up myself. Forlorn dagger with blade not sharp enough. Making creases in the direction of our mistake. As discrecion instructs the lost to find what was never there.

Tugging hard on the last remnants of this dilemma. Needing something to want. I'm almost there.

Every bottle emptied promising a new metaphor for the same old questions. Chilled and harsh the words blur into focus.

We lose each other in these fits of self-awareness. Children bending over to grab their stones from the numbered squares. Playing hopscotch with the demons. Stale martyrs of the lonely selling their shoe polish to naked feet.

It's easy when all those feet want is a pair of shoes. Something to separate them from the ground below.

Some way to know all those miles we walked won't soon forget.

Some lies will buy us. Others must be purchased. Sitting there. Thinking everything about yourself has already been sold.

The fruits of madness are sticky and sweet. They grow the same. Ripening on the branch. Until they have swelled enough. And it lets go. Dropping us in the yolk of our darkness. Tearing that paper shell into confetti.

Life sneezed me out. Mucus and all. One succinct convulsion and there we were. Trying to get recognized by eyes that had never seen us. Crawling inside graves with other names on them. Because we didn't know our own.

We had so many words for each other, but none that lasted. We had every way to say it hurt at our disposal. But we didn't know how to change it.

I don't suppose we really need to. It's better sometimes to wish you could have and know that you didn't.

The puppet in the corner. It had no hair. And too many fingers thumping through the darkness. Mad rabbit huffing the aerosol adrenalin can. In scratches. Digging each thought deeper into the skin. Raking the moment across it until the flesh is parted. What's underneath gushing to the surface in an innocuous mushroom cloud.

No rage left to balance. No grief to be the fulcrum. No more levers. Only switches now. On. Off. And that middle place where the spark stutters against itself. Waiting for our approval. Permission to live again.

Pull the hair. Shed that dress. In stark light so unkind I am startled by my own reflection. Without the nylon that turns pale legs dark. Without the black that makes dwarf eyelashes long.

Nothing but the switch.

On or Off.

Asking which I am.

Letting down the hem on this life. Unafraid of being small.

As close as we get. Wearing those heavy belts. As young as I once was to them. Moist castles tremble under the shadows of the wave.

We don't change. It changes us. A demolition at a time.

With callous fingers that never wear the words close enough. Serving truths in paper cups. The bottoms giving way.

We're marked for failure. We draw it upon ourselves. In crayons without labels. In colors that never did have names.

Go over the edge. I want you to. Know how far we are from ourselves.

One touch at a time we count our blessings.

Until there's nothing left to feel.

It's always that easy.



Just say my name. Tell me who you think I am.

Easy.

To be anything. Sprinting the highways in your palm. Visiting the little towns tucked between the mountains in your hands. Worn skin my gasoline. The taste of submission's menthol emptying my head.

It's always so easy. Unconsciously everything happens while I'm not there.

Too distracted with the abstract of the moment. How when even the most familiar things get too close it's impossible to recognize.

judiciously we balked
at the freud in
the angle of our words.

easily dismissing
the jung.
feeble as i can
try to be.

delicate

in my ire.

soft in my

rage.


every finger has
its mark upon the bottle
a bead of sweat to justify

when tomorrow wants to know
what we've done to ourselves

these are our choices.

better. worse.

or only the same.

Tabbing through the events. Mortified by their interpretations. They're my words. Not yours. I am not your wishing well. Save your pennies. I have not that cheek that sculpts a tear from shaky thoughts. Lives read like fairy tales to tired children.

So certain of my shortcomings and nothing else. The batter in the cage frozen by the pitch. Wrong. Right. I'd never considered them.

As I explained to myself what I wanted. Drawing those sheets back from that cold. cold bed. Finding shadows everywhere. Searching ghosts for clues to where those friends had gone.

Stencils in the dark waiting for a steady hand. Lies smoldering with the truths they conceal. Daggers cutting through leather skeletons.

There I found myself

Determined as I ever was
to hear, despite my deafness

I'm at my best, at the peak
of my limitations.

Ugly Saturdays become
Sundays dressed and poorly hemmed
by the days between

In his dialogue. So enormous. We walked. Word by word. Fist to cheek. Clenching our sightlessness in a mad attack against all the pictures already taken. Playing the cylinders in that lock like piano keys. Until feet were too bruised to dance.

Just barely night and already morning. In his dialogue was the counting. Cold petroleum hiding under bitten nails. And all the words I'd never hear.

The road hunting us again. Slowly learning the hoofbeats of the pavement. The tread of their indecision. The night has no stirrups. No reins.

We ride it bareback.

With our eyes closed.

Not wanting to see what's looking at us when we're not there.

The jigsaw of the habit fizzling into to its gap. The arbitrary shape of the moment not quite fitting in the spaces I have left.

The rise of the yellow. Soughing gods. In their broken limousines. Tilting heads back. CPR for the analogy. Gestating the lie. Carrying it in an empty womb. As if to say, I am not stricken by what you accuse me to want. Ever your victim. Never your slave.

The fall of the brown. Porcelain heels. Rubber toes. As the sand compiled its bibliography.

Tasting the eyes as they look. So impaired with vision. As soon as we're not too young we're old enough. To know why it had to lie to us. Pretend the karma was still listening.

Setting places at the table for those who had cheated our hearts. Dull knives buttering bread. In the throes of holes not ours.

The hunger I can live with. Pale dandelions seducing their grass. In lobotomies so tender.

I could spend my life making you prove everything you said. But why cut off the dog's tail when I find so much amusement in watching it chase.

Measuring the darkness. Twice.

Cutting once.

He had his shoes half off when I stopped him. Fetching the shadows in the turns of his choices. Endlessly chasing each other like those running christmas lights. Color after color mutating into the next. Celebrating lives we don't remember ever having lived.

In the acoustics of his frown I saw it. The red poisoning his cheeks. A waterfall of moments happening to us. Down. And down some more. To discover why the bottom always sings so sweetly.

It's too far to fall just to land there. Wanting to ask nothing but why I did. It's far enough to see where I was.

So many shepherds looking for their sheep. Bleeding hooves and branded asses. Crippling in my private pasture.

Betrayed by the herd again.

It doesn't need to hurt anymore.

But it still can.

He was just a little boy. So acute with his momma's frown. Like tattoo ink waiting in the needle for a break in the skin. He was just a boy. Digging his hands into the dirt. Wearing her every word under his fingernails. In little brown rainbows that never let him wish.

Just a boy.

Now a man.

Looking for momma in the mirror.

Windows like fire engines screaming their alarm. To no one who's listening. Looking out. And out. And out again.

House of card building him. Until he can't breathe. Trying not to collapse. Trying to be that boy she almost loved. Turning an eye to the camera. As it casts him in that moment. In the loom of that gaze. In those clothes. Wearing the future before the scars.

Just a boy. Asking when. Or if. He'll ever grow old.

Old enough.

To love that child.

Sunshine
Dirty Knees

Soon they'll all
be calling me
by name

Not remembering
I haven't been
her since

We woke the
rooster with
our insomnia

Fought the
demons with
our matchsticks

Rode the moon
until it buckled
under the weight

of our salvation

Sunshine
Knotted hair

And every way
still left
to wonder

Where beneath
us the earthquake
might wait

for us to happen

I don't need a friend. I need paper. Thick enough to grip the ink. Herd these rivers into their oceans. Until every drop is alive. Able to move and churn and spill without my input. Without my sacrifice.

Separate.

Not me anymore. Not found in the crooked lay of my glasses. Nor the deadened cock of my burgeoning vices. Not my blood. Nor my veins.

Just itself. As I watch it happen without me there.

I don't need a friend. Not that I have one. Or would know how to keep. As if they are kept and not begged to stay. I don't need the sunshine. I have the dark. And everything it shows me without hesitation. As though I am thick. And hungry like it is. A stubborn blade impaling the urge to feel them. Drink what water has become. And chew what flesh always is.

Bargaining with the void. Speaking in letters. Forcing the microscope to examine itself.

Because words don't mean anything to me. And all I can see is them.

They don't mean anything.

They're just preachers who don't believe in their own gods.

The right ear itches more. What with all that hearing what's not been said. Moist pseudonymns fit their masks for the charade. Burnt into their umbers as though they were the painting from the moment they it the palette. Dreaming in so many colors. It makes me tired. Older than I am.

He said we were close enough. No need to bring it nearer. Since we had seen and touched every edge of its razor.

He said come closer. Let me plug those holes you wear. Close the blinds that let your pain in. You're not alone. You just don't understand that it doesn't have to hurt.

And I said, no. I'm fine. And I do understand. Exactly how much hurt is required.

There are no people here. Only lovers. Shells spit out by the ocean. Reciting their dead poetry into strangers' ears.

I tried to say it didn't matter without sounding like nothing had. But the truth has its own way of answering questions not asked.

He said I could change and I assured him I couldn't. We played that game of tether ball for a while until I decided it was time to let him win.

He never said he cold help me. Just that I should help myself. And for the first time ever I agreed with him.

They always see lost in everything I think I've found.

Haaling the mouth of the river. It won't ever close. But this is the kind of wound that should stay open.

There isn't anything that can't be sold. That won't. Sour. The execution is after so much planning on doing. Nothing but turns. Turning. Chasing metal rabbits running on electric fences. Nothing to want other than myself. All these frailties sugaring my blood. Emotional diabetes. Heat wave under my skin and I can't make it rain anymore. No matter how tight I squeeze those clouds.

There's no rain left. Nothing.

I want it to be there. For it to hurt again. Like it did. Picking shadow off each other when only words were ours. Turning t-shirts into stretchers when broken was our summit. It hurt so much better than I ever thought it could. Your fingers the branding iron. My loneliness the leather.

It doesn't rain anymore.

Not like it used to. Sometimes I get wet.

But I want to drown in it. Like I did then.

Shivering. As frail as I need to be. A new suicide in every kiss.

Let me down easy. Or make it hard.

It doesn't matter at all.

The pieces are always the same.

There's a picture and it's taken me. Deep inside its camera. To where those shadows become shapes.

There's a billboard in my heart. And it screams so loud in giant letters and enormous lips. That the world has made it flat.

Pressed until every wrinkle relented. Giving up its eternal tantrum and finally falling silent.

There was nothing to hear anyway. Except how I tried to be and wasn't.

The choke of life gagging on itself. Like a needle dangling from a vein after the last dose of heroin.

Just trying to feel something.

Or maybe a little less.

Either way, it isn't working.

I just wanted to touch what I had felt. Snap. Crackle. Pop. The spoon in the milk instigating.

Friends.

And there we are swimming in those bowls. The hunger not a surprise. Only another tether on this long, long leash.

I don't want to hunt. Or be hunted by.


Just want to know why we're still here. What we say to each other when we can't hear. All the reasons it has to hurt.

I just wanted to be your overdose. For you to be mine. But how we kill each other always leaves us more crippled than dead.

One more lie I CAN live with.

That's all I need.

As the stale souvenirs of sex litter the floor. Footprints on my arms as words thumb through open shoelaces. The huff of our thinking audible again. As we inventory all the faces we only just took off.

They sure do go far.

Assless panties still trying to look full. Bright with the scent of that hysteria. The kind that comes from knowing you are and still wanting to lose.

You'll say it's easy. That I don't even try. But you're wrong. It isn't easy at all. Giving in.

Fetching every day with a leaky bucket. Running. Hoping to beat the hole.

Knowing.

It will always win.

I didn't say goodbye. Just hung up. It never seemed to matter what I'd said. Only whether or not I was listening.

From my little room where the lights don't breathe.

boasted the habits. so proud of my degradation. sucking the irony off of its popsicle stick. until all the sugar was gone. and only the tasteless juice remained for this apathy to quench.

in little rooms with walls too reticent. gaze of windows gone. i thought i might want to start over, but it turned out more satisfying to simply give up.

in little whispers from mouths unwashed. the taste of hope still poisoning fragile plates. as they shiver and quake with the meals we've missed.

in little rooms without much lighter the hunger frets its strut. Where the darkest corners of the stage can only mimic the fury of what's already been said.

in my little room. with my little sermons from preachers made of forgotten friends. i burn my tiny candles made of flesh. and wait for the puddles to reveal a way to retrace my steps.

i'm not lost. i just have no destination.

And no one wants to go there with me.