It was a new year and an old one. For all the teabags we'd left to steep in insomnia's thankless hug. He made the usual small talk. Words ticking like bombs. We'd never be those strangers again. Never tremble that way in the precision of the countdown.

He heard my cry at last. Pigeon droppings landing on my eyelids. He saw the woman. Witnessed the child. Who sees in the snowball the avalanche.

Playing with the English in his grip. Learning the gauze to conform.

It was a new year and an old one.

In every way.

The baseboards were wretching shadows as she bent down over everything. Tall at last against the furniture now dwarfed by the emptiness of the room. She was plucking and pulling at the moments unravelling. Coaxing the lies from their corners. Cobwebs collapsing on their own filth in a panorama of hurt.

No mess left to clean up other than ourselves.

He turned lightly against the grain of the bed. His eyes like pliers stripping the mood from the threads of the kiss. Carrying his penis in his hands he measured the steps piss by piss. Signing contracts written by fools with every embrace of her clitoris. The course of their pursuits leaving red footprints across the rug. Half-hearted specks of stardust settling upon the staircase. She cupped his balls like a statue. Her hands poured into that world soft and having been forced to grow hard inside it.

No name. No message. Just people losing each other. Or otherwise not finding anyone.

She sees the playground from her window. And asks herself why the swings are quiet. She watches the clock from her chair. And counts each year as an abortion.

We were at the junction where the bed post would've been had we that sort of sleep. That lent itself to the abysmal fantasies of heterosexual copulations. He was moaning charcoal tears in broad strokes. Like a child filling in a sunset.

He ratcheted me down into his folds in a sudden choke of the gears. Leaving my tires up in the air. To keep spinning as we broke. Abruptness is the language of passion. The evidence of our desires. As they poke up from within the thin veil that drapes our ordinary lives.

We stood at the door whittling the night down to a toothpick. Eyes drawing from one dot to the next in impaired ballpoint. Through the dense gauze of alcohol and sex. We're all geniuses in those moment of surrender. The clarity deadpanning our lives. In the punchline of some joke long ago dismissed..

He was soaking into his words. Like a hot bath tenderizes one's skin. Fastens a tether to all things urgent. Making everything as casual as the most meanningless sexual encounter.

The moment yanked the glasses from its face in a show of offense. Reveailing the little dents they had made where they cosntantly rested upon its nose. There was the sound of beds being made in the background. Sheets moaning to cover oversized mattresses. As the laundry trundled down the stairs in weak plastic baskets. She dressed herself anew. Washing up the coffeee dripped with a clean white sock. Sneaking into the sanctuary of the bathroom to take an inventory of her experience.

She glanced at him through the space between the door and the jamb. There was print all over his blank stare. She was always writing. Culling the plot from pinches of skin.

She was constantly imagining the grief the dagger must feel as it breaches the flesh.

The rain fell hostile and malevolent. upon the metal outside her window. The moon hissed softly and dark against the threat of her salient breath. Too willing to stop.

Thoughts bustled in shopping trips. So timely. Thoughts wore bows big and bright. As gifts pretended to give.

Little girls in sun stained skin and pleated dresses arguing their right to catch the football. With both hands.

I wish I could be as young as I was then. Finding father's less than adequate sums. Stronger as a child.

Superbly sure of everything that mattered. Were matter as simple as it was then.

Later on we conceded our flagrant campaign. Dovetails and doilies stained red by the stars as the night blinked on indefinitely from its vast orbit around our lives. Self-awareness and self-centeredness being readily mistakable.

He pushed the words from his throat like massive boulders. High school rushed back in thunder. Bullfinch's mythology. Atlas's shrugging and Icarus's burning up. I never understood him in writing. Only the manipulations bore apparent. Wrong keys feebly charming the locks that defy them.

We were panting in broken fits. Limping toward pleasure with sealed eyes. Closed tight against everything we feared we might see on our way to it.

I was trying life on. So big. Questioning the mirror. It was talking so fast. He'd work up a sweat just thinking of what to say. And then it would all tumble out like toothless kittens. Pity. Love. Where's the difference?

We were calmly calculating the seconds between that last orgasm and the next. Molesting the dandruff on love's shoulders. Hailing sex like a taxi on busy streets. Tiny placards through rotted plastic revealing their names so long after the fact.

I was talking to yesterday and as usual it wasn't listening. He pointed and said, there's a hole right there in the thigh of your pants. It's only a little one now, but be careful. They get so big so fast. Don't ever take for granted your linear existence. Mentallity doesn't give a damn what physics says. You're stuck here with me until that hole grows big enough to let you out. We're all stuck on this checkerboard playing square dances with plastic kings and ugly quuens until the castle and the rook coordinate their paths of attack.

I was listening to the future. Humming softly like a spinning fan. Whipping everything near it into a frenzy. Psyching it could reach out and grab my wrist. Shake it laterally until those pushed up sleeves of mine came loose again. It has some pungent instrumentals to share once in a while. Sometimes jazz I don't really understand. And as I am inched ever closer to it it tends to slow down. Abandon its static frenzy for some anemic braille. And as I rub against the raised partitions that dictate the life between the former and the next I conspire ways to catch that other me that's always running ahead to make tomorrow occur.

Perhaps I could slow her down. Or at least explain to her how wrong she is.

The frontal lobe bristled softly: this choice of death is obscenely slow. While the middle expelled a bloated breath in the vicinity of the bruise. Black was the window. And deep blue were the curtains. As the world in a vast collective pressed its nose to the glass to gawk at the deformity it showcased so frantically.

It is alive only in the most scientific of senses croaked the hypothalamus from its graffitied pedestal. It is not alive to touch. Nor needles. Nor drugs. It slouches toward the darkness dogmatically in its disturbed penance for having ever lived. It prays a rosary of masturbation and vice to the deaf gods that exist only in its head.

It only pats the bruise with precision jabs. Manically soliciting the pain reflex. It callously keeps us alive manipulating the flesh meant to give us substance.

We wither in the dark tent it surrounds us with. Second by second. The choice. The method. And the madness. All belong to it.

I was talking to the bottle. We were trying to decide on a rhyme. I was measuring its waist. Its bosom. Shopping for a dress. A hairstyle. That might flatter such a shrew. We were calculating the trash. That went into concealing the gifts. The algebra of happiness taking us back to high school. Distant chalkboards turning ones into sevens. A students into failures.

We were marking the teeth on the ziiper. As the back of her dress became the toes. The pleats in the bodice seeming to multiply as she breathed into the fabric. We folded the collar down in rote. And snapped on the heels. The stroke of razors seeming a natural progression from being beaten. Pregnant. Useless.

She was telling time with strokes of her hair. The fall of his pants. As the shadows folded at his shoes. So alike the layers of her labia as they parted to grant him entrance. Broken curtains pulled apart to let the stage consume the actors.

In the feeble dialogue we tenatively call our lives.

It was Sunday in my head. Catching songs by the hem. Hosting fables of charity. And friends. The games dimished in a sullen huff. We unrolled our beds in a garish flourish. Hearts kilted in tartan garb. And the screech of bagpipes crying song.

He undressed himself uneventfully. As though his clothes were constraint. He wore naked like a terrycloth robe. A humored husband unaware how old he'd become.

He slipped into sex like a thread does through a needle's eye. In steady hands. Knotted tightly at the end. Pointed and hurtful as he slithered through the open ends.

Not to seal the rift, but only to show it still exists.

The alarm went off, but it wss still dark.

There was a quarantine on those memories. Yellow tape and red signs tacked askew across those thresholds in thought. Caspers playing hopscotch in the attics of our lives. Little pebbles sounding so big. Numbers in every square. Telling us where it was safe to step.

Nowhere really.

Until those clothes don't fit anymore. And those closets have been exterminated of their boogeymen.

A clumsy ballet choreographed by whim. Where all the dancers are crippled.

He was counting the hens instead of the eggs. Never noticing they hadn't laid any. He was sleeping in his underwear. More stoned than dreaming. The receiver sobbing in his ear of missed opportunities. Pageants in his pants without a winner. Pissing over the details until no one cared.

His face buried so deep in the pussy. Even the ass didn't matter.

You can lie about many things. But truth isn't a fact. It's a preception. You can count the beers. The minutes that dissipate between them. But reelase isn't a goal. It's an obstacle.

You can count the countries in the world. One finger at a time. The seas. The oceans. But when you stop thinking. There's only yourself. Only what you thought you knew. Or had hoped you would.

Lost little demons still grieving the halos you once sported. All those years looking forward to then. When it finally came time to abandon all hope it seemd the very last thing I was willing to do.

It finally left in a small, inconsequntial belch. But even years later. The taste of it remains. Still lingers. Effortlessly. A dying ballon. Wheezing out its last laugh. At the back of my throat.

Determined to die as loud as its life was quiet.

Drowning in its most sincere of metaphors. As happiness imagined what she'd look like should its knocking ever pry her our of her chair.

They were on the side of the road. Hitchhiking with empty wine glasses rather than thumbs. Tiny red halos anointed their kunckles as the sun threaded through the droplets of bastardized grapejuice still clutching the bottoms.

I say they were on the side of the road rather matter of fact. As that's where they spent most of their time. Sucking on Hershey bars. Square by square. Sipping levities made more of scent and attitude than of drugs.

I would watch from with the confines of my own 'occasions' that shameless tableau of strange lives fumbling at emotional orgasms from depths of depression. And all the vices that so readily attach themselves to it. Kicks of dirt impersonating footprints. Volleying for any kind of indication that they had struggled. Traversed.

Made it as far as this.

The traffic lights cycled as arbitrarily as they always did. The greens arriving so seldom that we began to believe the world had stopped. Or we'd fallen off. Without the benefit of sidewalks we fell over the uneven patches. Constantly. Heavily catching ourselves. The world screamed violently in every vehicle that murmured passed. But it still seemed to be gone. Or to have forgotten we were there.

We'd call it a holiday because everyone did. Not that it meant anything to us other than no mail and bad tv. We'd read questions off of cardboard diapers and laugh when the shit hit us in the face.

We'd never say, but it would happen to coincide that the same years ago we would remember we were both better and worse. We had more of the answers then, but only because the questions were easier.

He never said, but he implied surgery. In drives. And in putts. There was a par he had in mind. Stitches in dead bears planned long before their arms had fallen off. In cautious undressings. Rehearsals of the catastrophe. We had labelled every hole. Dressed it in its tuxedo. And watched the limo pull away with it inside sipping a pertinent scotch.

He was over. And under. And everything inbewtween that keeps us young enough to expect. What we think we deserve. Or have earned. What we've dreamt about when the walls were quiet enough to hear me thinking about how dense they've become.

Paper dolls multiplying in cellars unattended. Paper dolls insisting I give them each a name. As if I ever knew from where they came.

The paper in those wastebaskets not mentioning. Not daring to refer to all ths people who had found. A way inside.

His virtue was his vice. How it crumpled him up to show the wrinkles that were always there. Shoving all the words too close. Where they would meet against their will. Becoming strangers finally. Changes rubbing hard on the condoms between love and sex.

He was coloring with both hands. Always telling me there was no picture. He was writing on both sides of the page. WIth words he'd never have. Little pills taking over.

I saw the bottom then. So perfectly clear. I took the rose off of its stem. Counting the petals as they fell.

One at a time.

Echoing the questions I had never asked him.

As I couched in my chair morning came eventually. But the night before had never really happened.

We pulled up close to the curb with a long gown earnestly engulfing my thighs. A stare in the opposite direction. Secure in our humanity. Content with the creak of the vacant swing.

We suffered up an excuse. In the most sober hours of night. Not old enough yet to hate what we'd become. Or realize its permanence. We arranged the dirt on the grave. Into a mosaic of thoughts. Not the least of which was why.

We hung from the ceiling. Like bats do. Carefully tucked inside our claws. Telling love in lies so plain. That we were relieved. When it was over.

Fertile muscles tensing and cajoling seldom hearts into submission.

In the stiff oasis that is skin. We waded. Sirens in every breath. Hairs at the back of our throats tickling the words. Strangers to each other in every sense of the term. Snobbish patrons of the art called loneliness. We bent down in silence to get a closer view of the catastrophe occuring. The oasis of touch was voided by the tremble of vision.

Counting by twos. the cruel antonyms sprouting in our rows of eden. Assuming every apple had been poisoned.

I toyed with the interpretation. Making miniatures of every pause. Die-cast, habitual models of serendipity in all its vacuum. Clogged.

Waiting for the dog to stop barking. For the child to stop pelting the dumpster with his football. It reasoned without provocation that time had suffered in its corset long enough. Longer than it had to. And we were fortunate. To be there at the bow's inception. And at its release.

I never knew I could die so exquisitely. Or would have known all the deaths there are to cherish. If not for that first one.

In acrylic. Embedded in straied brushes. In charcoal. Bound to fingerprints stolen from lovers. Arrested from the coax of sex after the sheets had gone cold again. There was the obvious. The bruised ribs to point to and blame. The devils under the angel's gowns. Trying to conceal their zippers.

Toadstools. In the words. Between them. Herpes at the end of every breath. I was sitting in traffic. Listening to songs I could only vaguely understand. Fathers schooled by their children. Husbands divorced from their selfishness. A chaos of fantasies preforated by the score of truth.

Deviously despairing in a precocious drama of trying to maintain his happiness.

I was sitting in traffic. Taking careful note of the intersections. As I approached the close of the gap. Reds, yellows and greens ignited by the impatience of a hundred lonely passengers in the seat next to me.

We discussed evolution int the technical sense. How the equations had spit us out more mangled than we'd gone in. How the claculations didn't care who they were hurting. Nor the people who had created them.

Braking in small sighs. I left him with the thought that we were helpless. That we'd always been.

Only now it had been proven.

We were moving the chair with both hands pointed away. Letting the sock grow red while we contemplated the best remedy. In hops. In skips. In long white strips of tape that inhale the pain like a narcotic.

I gave in and pulled on a second shirt. Letting the long sleeves erase all I'd drawn down my arms. Footnotes on life in faint scars at the base. Biographies of strangers in the moodier ones at the crease. Flawed liasons with the happiness carving the artist from his own skin.

With butter knives.

Lend me a chisel. Spare me a hammer. Help me find myself from inside all these images.

She squatted in prefect indignation. While the shadows caulked between the colors she saw. Giving a name to each and every lie.

Without hesitation.

Perfumed melancholy biting its lip again. Filling the cracks in her tongue with flavors she thought extinct.

There was just a little blood on the tip of her toe. Leftover lipstick from the injury's kiss. Termites in every thought. Hollowing out the skeleton while the skin sunk in heavy pleats. Threatening to reveal what hid below.

All the Gershwin roses and the kitten's fists. In bottles crayoned green until I can't keep up with all the letters in all the words in all the sentences that want to be last night instead of this.

She traced the smoke with her stare. Castrated eyes desperately trying to ejaculate. In defeated huffs and awkward grabs. Fetching the bottom in breathless plunges. As though it hadn't always been theree.

On the pupils of the raindrops as they winced. On the smile in the glass. As it looked back at us. So certain.

It fondles itself in cold crescents baked warm. Rolled loosely with greasy fingers ample for redress. We wore color. Flaunted stern like metal detectors gone off. Triumphant and idle in the same alarm. In patent leather shiny enough to thwart the naive. She stalked. Click by click. A horde of locusts ready to erupt from under her heels.

Perfectly defeated. Austere as her failure demanded. She swam out of the waves of her nightgown to rescue him. As he pretended his drowning. As helpless as a wolf. As tender as a hammer. She wore the role of nail to infinity. Knowing there were limits. Stopwatches calculating her every breath. As her abdomen leaked an empty syrup she could barely differentiate from dying.

Once tidily under the covers she told herself stories. In scratched records. Old turntables struggling to spin. She'd fall asleep to the songs. Smothered in the costumes children assume are their future. In the betrayals that were almost friends.

Writing letters to herself. Unable to translate what it was she had said.

We probably didn't walk that far. A few times around the earth with bandages on all ten toes. An anchor in each pocket. That was the way he talked. Laden with years surpassing his age. That was the way he kissed. Lonely. And childless. That was the way he fucked. Like he had something to prove to himself. That he wasn't as old as he felt. That it wasn't too late.

He knew where to rub and what to lick, but it was a beaten path. He'd try to feel, but the package always got in the way. What once was heaven only earth again. Soil between our toes. Footprints all over the bed. Leading away from.

I never faltered for conversation when we talked. Because we were always wasted. That parody of ourselves that had led to all those Sunday afternoons. Painted toenails in tube socks. Armpits yawning for their kisses. Little girls seducing grown men. His bed stroking the walls with a desperate rhythmn. While I laid beneath him. A gnarled tootsie roll. Still in its paper. Confident I'd never be tasted.

Nothing to walk on. Nowhere. He touched me like toenails ripped from the skin. Socks flooded in red. No heels. Just loosely laced sneakers drawn around the footprint. Of injuries more shocking than sudden. Of scales that label more than measure.

Were we always crippled. Only now it's obvious. We were always alone. Only know we have proof. Pain so fatted on our grief that it leaves us with nothing to regret. Anorexic depression withering as it continues to run though we've stopped feeding it.

One less foot. One fewer curtain to part. To tease the sun with rumors of recovery that dominate the idles of addiction. More blood. To clot. To pressure with the promise of actual scars. Salient portraits of a life mismanaged. Useless vows of the flesh to learn from the moments it can't remember.

Except for the colors it left in our skin.

As we cradled the bruises we assumed were our friends.

Softer attitudes confront in muted sighs. Breathing again. It stops some times. And I forget how it started. Where it begins. It stops and I don't mind. Don't worry if it'll ever start again.

There are anecdotes in even the most brutal of prisons. Quaint stories fathers tell their children after the hardship has been overcome. We are so delicate when we're picking up the fruit. Filling our baskets with the pebbles. Leaves wtih our names scratched into them. Finally fallen.

There are lies even in the most truthful of persons. How good it felt. The stabbing. The reluctance. Of flesh to conform to circumstance.

There are threads dangling from every moment. And needles. Waiting to be threaded.

But I can lose. I can lose. And see the victory in it.

I can give them each a name, but I don't know if they'll answer to it.

The movie said. Spoke. Whittled in balsam platitudes. First. Best. Was both arms. Smothered in him. After all that smothering. Give her some more. A woman needs to be suffocated by a man. To know she is loved. She needs to be suffocated. To know she isn't dead.

I tried to remember. Some of my afterwards. I have no idea what happened once the act was over. Maybe we drank. Maybe I smoked. I think I wanted more some times and others I just wanted to be left alone.

Second was one arm around. Bodies parallel. Casually cradled in the weight of the experience. A cautious transition from in deep to putting on our clothes.

Third was just a hand on the stomach. A gentle pressure in her breathing to indicate the shadow lying next to her.

But the worst. Oh the worst is her holding him. As he gazes at the ceiling. Silently calculating how many minutes more he must lay there before he can leave without hurting her feelings.

I tried to remember any of those moments. But all I could recall was that feeling of helplessness. Waiting for the the gap between sex and lovers to open up again.

Helen wasn't of Troy. Troy was of her. One face all it takes to change the world. Change comes in sneezes. Sudden and violent. And then pretends to leave. While in nests in the crevices of our underwear drawers. Next to the stockings I never wore.

The table cradled us near enough. In limping glances that always chose their crayons without reading the labels. We colored inside the lines. And outside of them. Until the picture was gone.

It was random. It was calculated. Like all lovers are.

We'd pant out our vows in the lulls between the knowing. I waited for the echo to come resonate from those canyons. Our pale orchestra to make it more than just music.

But it never did.

I wasn't wrong. I don't believe that. But right. This close.

Is an ugly predicament.

He had
chronic ethusiasm

He was
so sure

About everything
except us

We were
so high

That it
hurt to look down

See ourselves there

Ready to resume
the lives we

had abandoned

I listened only
long enough

to hear him say
we were over.

Turn me over. Write me down. I'm anything but permanent. Frantically worn by each episode of clarity.

He combed his hair with his fingers. Mine too. Plotting a course through the tangles in each stab of recogniction. He was hard candy. Cellophane wrinkling as I unwrapped. So long on my tongue before I could actually taste him. We were getting there until there got us.

I was hitting the buttons. Mapping out the path. Clutching the beeps like echoes of prayers. Going deaf trying so hard to hear what hadn't been said.

He adjusted his grin and stood up to ask permission. But I had already agreed.

Running stairs in the room next door. Footsteps drumming like anxious fingers. Impotent earthquakes trace the transitions from when to if. We crumble because all those adhesives lied to us.

At the anchor's eblow. Where the choices dream of being right. At the decision's breast. We nervously unbuttoned her blouse only to discover she had always been naked. That there was only pleasure in not knowing.

Weren't we flannel? Weren't we velvet? Tactile monsters in lover's clothing. Creating answers to riddles that didn't exist.

Tomorrow came and went without ever knowing how long I'd waited.

Sapphire was the color of the day. In some atrocity of autumnal hues it burped itself out from between the dying branches. He was ready with his nail gun. To build upon tomato cages left behind. After the harvest.

She greeted him with a clawed embrace. When he turned away she checked for blood in the moments that laid calmly there. Silently piling up like snow drifts before the plows have come. So certain what was buried wanted to be.

Abstract tug of wars always ending with the same cliche. Dirty faces. Red hands. Holding the ropes long after they've lost their grip.

Drunken ants coaxing their crumbs. In delirious fits of strength not unlike the way we were.

When our skeletons were visible.

She was in the middle of nowhere in that traffic jam. The city just mountain tops broken by clouds. The cars just dragons learning how to fly. There was music in every sense of the word. Throbbing in the sweat of red lights about to change. Sobbing in the empty seat that always sat under her elbow.

She was touching the edge every time she had to blink. Lonely roads perspiring in her thoughts until the stink woke her up. Smeared on the canvas. Fractured bumpers. Howling sirens. The moments dry fast. Harder than I am. Or ever want to be. The moments happen. In distant Hiroshimas. Closer than I care to admit. In wars that pretend someone's right. And battles that don't know who belongs to them.

She was trying to figure out where she was going. While a thousand green lights came and went. But no one was moving. She was admiring the riddle of her cellphone. How she took it everywhere, but had yet to use it. For anything other than proving it didn't matter what buttons she pressed.

There was tomorrow she'd always been told, but she had never found it. And therefore assuemd she never would.

When she finally gets home and all the city is dark she knows. She's no stranger to it.

He was wearing watermelon shoes. Counting the seeds. As if love could speak sign language to translate the interstice between action and speech. Stubborn and contrite vagaries spat from his fingers. As he counted how many. How much. If. Need could be a satisfactory substitute for love.

Indicted. Sammy bent down and snatched the wrapper off of her listening. More than hungry enough to welcome left overs. In the smile between her legs as they danced against the tug of gravity. Emboldened by the ripple of her flesh as it struggled to let him enter. He began to sprint. She chased the emptiness with a grunt and began preparing for the end. Imagining his eruption in her head. Similar to throwing up.

She said she was ready, but he hadn't heard. Or tried to. The debt in her voice. Or seen how pale the alternative. She was always ready. And never was. For the next move. The stalemate that they were.

In all the little ways that never mattered until it was over.

August was ugly. September was beautfiul. We were holding the petals up to the stem. Trying to assign life to a dead bouquet. There were rabbit's feet telling stories on the corner. As the stretlights smuggled in shreds of darkness. So absolute.

He was facing the wall. Trying to find a crack. But I was already smitten with the door. Cold appeals to the justice love seldom flaunts.

In a calm obituary we wrote. Like it had happened to someone else. In the newsprint that stained our fingers we reveled. Like so many swings that continue to echo. Like the so many people who were almost that close.

He wasn't anyone I'd ever know until I had to have someone. It was urgent. I was hysterically social. As young as I'd ever be. Throwing off clothes like shackles. Biting my nails as the ships chugged through the opened bridges. Thinkng. Knowing. WInter was coming. Ant it never really leaves. Year after year. It's a little colder come each spring. And there are always a few less flowers than I remember there being.

We weren't trying to be anything other than estimates of the life we imagined might come after this. We were carving pumpkins with empty bics. Seeing faces that aren't. Won't ever be there.

We were knocking on doors. With sacks taller than us. Taking candy from strangers. Because everyone was.

We were discussing the way the molding meets the floor. In such an ordinary transition from form to function. We were talking ourselves into to thinking it was enough. The everything we've always had. And all the rest that'll never be ours.

I was supposed to be listening. Pushing the tacks into my heart. But all I could do was talk. In words that I never use. Unless I'm trying to be someone else's child.

There was the package. To open. Insides waiting to be heard. There was the message. Winking at me. To listen to. There was everything happening. In a fury of noise. In an exception of strangers. Time in its stockings. Circumstance adjusting the garters.

High heels on the sofa. Walking tall on heavy clouds. Sneakers on the chair. Running hard against the walls. With too many lights on when we belong in the dark. Quilts in the washer teasing the wrinkles on their frays. Jittery hands sewing. Not to mend. Just waiting for. A reason to recover from all this fixing what was never broken.

Until we each have. Our own halves of the nothing.

We were icing the bruisers in the carpet. Sunken cupcakes all around. We were debating with the vaccine. Like we had a choice. Born with the needles in our veins.

I had ripened in the dark. Without ever wondering what else there might be. I knew there would be people. Like him. If I went out there.

The moon was barking loud against an army of sunsets. Knowing it would win. But not without losing something.

She was someone else before them.

And will be after.

Should the vaccine ever prove itself viable again.

There was something to be heard. In the awkward pantomine of our touch. Tiny thoughts capitulating to even smaller ones. I had decided the night before what we'd do. The blizzard came right on time. I took the arrow by the hand and carefully inserted its poison.

Until everything was dead.

I don't know whether he knew my name. Or if his was true. I only know how he left right after we were done. Headlights in the rain. Choking on the stale of guarded intersections.

I got up to toss the bedpsread into the washer. Thoughtlessly cleaning out the red. Because there were so many new stains I still wanted to make in it.

We ate alone together. In tone and truth. And all the dots that wait for when we'll have enough ink to connect the two.

Hope isn't eternal. It's just more patient than I am.

We stopped briefly to purchase a case of warm beer before proceeding to the universal conundrum of casual sex. As foreplay he sung me a song he'd written for someone else. But I enjoyed the guile being so transparent.

The beer spilled over and so did he as I panted in time with his jabs. Carelessly motivating myself to let go. For once the goal wasn't to fill the hole.

But rather to prove how big it had become.

His words were erect with a raging hard-on. Punative and absolved of guilt by lessons of the heart.

We all stood for the duration. Bold innuendos brave enough to insinuate. Our choice of choices. In little pillars made of salt. That had dared to look back on the site of the devastation.

Only half the world left in the skin not claimed. By time and circumstance. And other imbeciles of this condition. We claim is happiness when sobriety shoves its foot up our asses.

I haven't been drunk for who knows how long. But I've been drinking too much for a ages.

Does it really matter what or who was loved. Does the water know the hole it leaked from.

Even if we could put it back. What's to stop us from losing it again?

Diminished seductions plague the earnest lover. In tepid repetitions of colors long ago faded. He imagines her broken. Devastated. What else could she be? Because that is what he believes true love demands. A little bit of ego too perhaps. In her protest she confides in him that she prefers the pieces. But has no trouble assembling them.

In her thoughts when memoory insists there are indeed the hounds. And the fox that flees from them. But it's not a hunt so much as a it is a cermony.

The only thing I lost was the need to keep running.

He was sober enough for the both of us. Not that I'd ever seen him drunk. Just little skips of delirium that would punctuate his depression. Some cousin of euphoria that preferred to serve its ice cream already melted.

Even when he was miserable I still envied him.

Everything to lose. And risking all of it. Stuffing dollar bills into slot machines dubbed sex. And always winning.

It was at his lowest points that I loved him the most. It was the way he made love to me that last time that I knew it was just sex.

Something like a tumor. Showing up long after it can't be removed.

Sometimes love is the lottery. Others it's just pocket change. Someone else's Twix callously dangling at the overlook of a foreign train station vending machine. Sometimes sex is just sex. Protracted labia lapping at tiny urethras. Others it's just a consolation prize.

A stiff handshake. After the interview.

Sometimes life comes to us. In unctuous stabs. Both a friend and a liar. Wanting us to give to it. Whatever it is we can. Other times we come to it. Crawling on scabby knees. Hoping it will take from us. Whatever it is we think we have.

Sometimes love is rich. Soft ice cream flirting with plastic spoons. Melting elegantly as we count the grains of sand that keep the water just distant enough not to be a threat.

Sometimes it's huge.

Others it's as small as we are.

He made an example of me. In moments tithed flawlessly. She stood and compared the darkness to her pupil. In its dilation. She pulled the pillow under her head. In a stale seance. Of ghosts not willing to be dead.

She was counting the pages. The riddles they had tried
answering.

She was naming them Finger by finger. Assigning reasons to their graves. She was digging with her hands. In soiled basins.

She was deciphering the cryptograms. As if she knew who had said.
What she wanted to hear.

She was reading his mind. Afraid to answer him.

Previously on real life... things turned ugly when Jim ate Dolly's last remaining Milky Way. Leaving her caramel thighs dangerously unsheathed. Double blades slicing as she stomped her way to the post office. To wait in line for things she wishes she didn't need.

They took her pennies. They weighed her stare. Affixing the appropriate sticker to the package she had just then realized was hers. Loose t-shirts had found their way to her shoulders. Thick denim had built itself around her ass. There were never enough mirrors. To see all of herself.

She measured the steps from the exit to her driver's seat. In small breaths. She paused to let the narrator speak. His obvious wisdoms. She'd always assumed her life was a fortune cookie.

That she'd know nothing of herself until she'd been broken.

On the next episode of real life... expired deli meats and the men who call them lunch.

She said she was ready for it to be over. In a soft voice like rain against the window. Juggling itself. Victim by victim. Until. We're all liars. Or friends that don't now how close you were to hating them.

I wasn't sorry. Just watching him tie his shoes. Sideways. Thrilled with having found something to know him by.

She said I should hurry. I'm so much older since. Love found me. Slit my legs right down the middle.

She said, I'm whole. For the first time ever.

It continues to rain outsids. But I know when it will end.

By the way he looked at me last.

There was a ceiling in his stare. That I could never touch. Such strict diseases and loose antidotes. He showed me his watch. My thoughts chased the second hand. As it played hopscotch across my heart.

We were perched on the edge of the bed. Little vultures debating the size of the carcass. The door wringing its hands. The knob trembling. Happiness drawing on the window in a halting lisp. Words so far away from where we were.

Gluttonous timelines bartering with minutes. Anorexic euphorias.

Always spitting us out.

It was an earnest fuck. The kind that lets you lay there afterwards and contemplate why sex is still enough. To change your criteria for happiness.

It was hard. It was soft. In the way all friends are. So many dominoes poised to knock each other down. We weren't even close.

It was a long goodbye to let go of it. Possessions happening to us. In stuttering attempts to know each other. That part of him I thought I owned. More than ample weeds to cancel out this garden.

So many utopias to choose from. Now that ours is gone.