We dog paddled through the conversation. Asides to the audience at every pause. Short grass relented to the frost. The bed with its lips curled back in a growl that always asked when the new carnival is coming. The pillows singing. Spinning. A ferris wheel of strangers loping through a slow rotation of sex.

You must be this tall to ride.

You must be this old to get off.

There in the long queue we met. Grabbing at new deliriums with shaky fingers. Looking up together at the altitude. The preposterous premise that the greater height you fall from the sweeter the impact.

You must be my friend to become my lover. But it's only an estimate. Since I've never really had either one.

Ugly synonym plague the ground. As we carve the outline once our stance. Colors turn and coil the axis. In puzzles solved without the heart. A rubik's cube come between us. As we lurch toward the squares that never move.

The movies lie. The weather guesses. But nothing we know has ever known us. Not the skins we've peeled from them. Nor the ones they pulled from us.

There is always autumn even during summer. Dark leaves on the brink. Anticipating the fall.

This cold cotillion that wears my lust boasts of pennies we've yet to toss. At fountains full of unheard wishes.

The darkness pomps like a petty god. Knowing it's the only one we have left.

Lost in the alarm. galoshes for every toe. I turned to the snow and asked it why it always fell. It told me I was wrong. It didn't fall. It waited to be caught.

There's nothing like the weather to soften your shoes. Wear away some of that tread. Chase away those spare tires we remember as friends. There are far better ways to die than slow like this. But none of those other methods could ever make life so memorable.

If all things must die I want to attend every funeral.

If life is as it seems one stage of forgetting after the next I want to remember. If I'm lost I want to be lost.

Nothing else.

After it's over there are all the details to extrapolate. Invent. It's just a threatening sky until I'm wet. I couldn't tell you which raindrop fell first. Nor which ushered out the parade. I only know that I'm drenched. That the details don't matter until it's time to come in from the rain.

I didn't paint the house. Didn't build it. The small windows that look like eyes when the moon is lazy. The recessed door that tries and fails to conceal the entrance. I didn't plant it there so far from all the others. I just found it like that. And no, I'm not the house, but I've lived there.

Culling life from fallen branches. Inspecting the sour fruit its dropped for any seeds to plant.

I didn't build the house. But I will take responsibility for creating it. As it stands now. It isn't my home, but I do live there.

At least for now.

Whatever color it happens to be.

I pulled up a toadstool next to little Alice and asked her how small she felt. She said she had pink dreams after rendezvous with the white pill. That's when everything else getts big. And that she slept bluely because of the green ones. That's when everything turns small.

And then she said.

And then she said.

I have the best dreams ever when I take them all.

Turmoil crowned in its vapid jewels. Like we were once so indebted to the choke of weakness. Heavy crowns tarnished kindly by fate's soft smirk. Ambivalent fingers shuffle the men. On the stiff checkerboards we've poorly painted. There is never time enough. Never a chance to go back and say it as you heard it your head. While they laid beside you. Obese balloons bargaining with gravity for a little more string.

If we were. That close.

Soft gods in their coffins. Drowning in the funerals of men.

Overwhelmed by the approach of skin. As it sprints to cover every hole.

Then we still are. Always will be.

Weak enough.

Eyelashes would appear sometimes on the high cheekbones of the room. And she'd make wishes she'd share with no one. Long, soft tendons quietly rearranging the paths of dormant skeletons. As the darkness blinked through its amnesia to call her by name.

Away from her perch looking back at them. The hours disposing of their faces with the casual acumen of arithmetic. Subtraction. As efficient as it is callous. The birth of experience coinciding with the death of everything that has given it to us.

Damn the truth for being so honest. Damn the lies for telling me what I wanted to hear. Damn me for believing either one.

Mark the distance from her hand to her cheek. It's in that number you'll find the measure of a woman.

How long she's waited.

For you to find her.

You're not old, but there is much younger. Deep in that mushroom cloud some call sex you launder your dead. Buttoning the creases with furtive fingers. As passive as a nightmare. As subtle as anal sex. Pale sheets to fold in dartboards marked favor. In joints labelled friends.

Calm is the patriarch some will worship as salvation. Slighted as a god can be. Its power darted by the disciples of its dominion. Feverish gods hurrying for our approval. When all thees drugs have failed us.

And all that's left of awe is how they've how much.

Tomorrow lost to demons we'll never reach.

I bought myself a new bed. Stained in the color of bitten lips. Sculpted to mimic the shape of the songs as they warp over the trundle of bodies infected with pleasure. Upholstered at the top with partitions to consider. When self-preservation fails the scale I weight myself with.

I yanked another Sunday from the clench of red lights and the snap of traffic. Addiction playing off the yawn of the windshield as we cut left turns like paper dolls. Disguising all our circles as art. Packages in the backseat like dead children we'd never named. Penises I can remember only by the pants they left for me to trace.

Examining the pillows. Making up the words they might say. If we still spoke. Or there were reason to. Put eyeliner on these ghosts. Or lip gloss on these zombies. Dressing up the dead in curlers. In drugs that bring me close enough to know their cold.

Everything in italics.

There were sidewalks.
And shoulders.

Close enough to name.

There was the pervasive pretense of metaphor to pluck the poetry from my fingers. While we tested the flavors still remaining on our tongues. Chocolate covered condoms wrapped in the thin foil of eager wastebaskets. Children I'd never have suffocating inside a tiny plastic reservoir.

Men I'd never see again writing their phone numbers on my walls. Little stabs of art punctuating what passes for life when goodbye knows you better than you do yourself.

Thousands of leeches turning this flesh into a smorgasbord.

I just let him hold me. Fell effortlessly into the shape of his arms. Cradled in the stench of his lust. I just let him love me. Knowing it was temporary. Seized the day as it were. I just let him love me. Because I had never been closer. To such a thing.

It's not mine now. It never was. Even as I fondle it in words carefully selected. Tracing every frail hint of affection in permanent ink. Drawing on this onion skin I call my life. As what it's pressed against shimmers vaguely through.

In the chemical blizzards that smother memories in art. Perfectly resigned to the years that turn lovers into lessons.

I ask myself how I could have loved him. But I don't want an answer.

strength in every failure.
freedom in sorrow.
knowing the moment
is lost.

sunken ships she called
her moments of clarity
stalked the pale gauze
of her happiness.

convalescing
in the tears
of youth's
soiled linens,

a child unmolested
by the intricate
griefs her mind had
so carefully cultivated.

one cigarette at a time.

when i am me
i have a storm
to prove it to myself.
it rages like i do

too distant for
anyone to notice.
peeling the layers
from the darkness
in a search for itself.

stepping on the
broken glass and
wondering which of
my faces is gone.

close to the margin.
nearer to the tear.
i'm your paper.
write on me.

i'm your ink.
wear my pain.

faces at the fold
perpetuating my desire
to be someone i could want.
like i have wanted him.

my one truth.
my only constant.
the only whole i've
ever known is gone.

Should I look for patterns in the sheets surely there are instances to be found. Coincidence on its tiptoes. Loose crowns lost from their princes. Gardens harvesting their people.

Three-legged mini skirts. And fists of breasts. Easy as stepping on nails.

Lighted lampposts at the fronts of empty houses. Tense corsets of yellow windows holding their breath. To sneak into. Costume that don't fit.

Trick or treat is anyone's guess.

It was quiet.

Yawning walls. Shadows pantomiming broken songs. As I teetered on the edge of the chair. Trusting only my fingers to steady me. Frail branches to support my weight. As the leaves drop off.

It was quiet.

As quiet as a blizzard. The soft shoe dance of snowflakes on the pavement. As quiet as a dial tone. Or the croak of an answering machine. When there is no cure for insomnia. When I've frittered through all the ghosts of that fairy tale and still don't know if the world would be different wihtout me.

It was quiet.

Like It's always been.

The dragon was doing his laundry. He didn't have to separate. Everything was grey. We were only waiting for our dry cleaning. Noticing how many quarters it cost to clean your things. How happily the dryers tumbled with other people smiles.

They handed us our blanket and bedsheets like crude christmas gifts. Wrapped in cellophane. Crinkles cackling as I pulled the packages to my chest. Warm grass still moist with the dew of morning's first piss. Molesting the fading dreams sleep had wept.

The bed hovered on bent wings. The mirror paced. The dragon began folding his things. What do dragons wear anyway? What do people see in those tired rooms. Those nervous mirrors. What do they see?

How many pairs of jeans does a dragon need? How many tuxedos? How many lovers?

Till it can feel the fire in its throat?

Three beds later I still hadn't decided which one to keep. The architect was anxious. The damsel was distressed. Raw steel fairy tales scratched the stage. Leaving jagged footprints for the actors to follow. I turned on my side to look at him with boulders in my breath. Heaving out every little word. My eyes a wrecking ball. There is never room between sex for love. Only before or after.

Those are the rules.

It's not a decision. It's a consequence.

It's the doorbell on Saturday morning. Jehovah's Witnesses. It's Halloween. Giving away candy to people in masks. Just like I do everyday.

It's the things that make it easy to fall asleep when it should be difficult. The so many ways there are to undress without ever revealing anything.

I was swimming in the moat. Hiding under the drawbridge. Counting my castles out loud. Like stacking pennies in paper tubes. Even a lot didn't amount to much. But there is therapy in fruitless pursuits. There is solace in knowing you're poor. That all the money or anything the world has to offer can never make you any richer.

I was sitting at the back of the vault. Listening to the lock tick. An impervious metal heart documenting the eras between my bankruptcy and my wealth. One face at a time deposited into this void. To fill it in moments. To empty it in years.

Sages and fools each of us. For trying so many times to open those doors.

The painting on the ceiling have never been this close.

Souvenirs in the dim perpetuity of skin. Latex dominoes tumbling through the elaborate contraptions our bodies invent. Preshrunk cotton sighing. Stale mannequins ripped from their faces. Gauze shadows on the wall hangings. Changing the images to suit crisis. Or rather, what it means at the moment.

The rails of the escalator don't move with the steps. I buy more paper, but it still isn't blank.

There in the exchange that takes place when I'm deciding how much longer I should remain sober, nothing is so charming as the prospect of dying. Not sixty years from now. Maybe tomorrow. Or next week. Preferably not on a holiday. Or a weekend.

But whenever it should happen. Or I should coerce it to be. In it there is so much potential. Even to die on christmas would be better than to live waiting for it to happen.

We wore sober in different colors. Different fabrics. The same for stoned. His little mountain making my own feel so big. I was small next to him. It's the only time I remember feeling little. That he could scoop me up at any time. Proving I wasn't as heavy as I tried to seem.

We gloated in the hours before sex and after. Pilgrims demolishing their Mayflowers. Now that the rock had been reached. Prince charmings in grey armor dismounting their horses to remove the veil from sleeping beauties. Poisoned dreams to cure us of our hearts. Make room for the life that comes after all is lost.

Witches at their cauldrons. Incanting. Spells long since defeated.

I couldn't say what it meant then. Remembering her makes me blind. But I know what it means now.

The devils in their tuxedoes asking us to dance. Starched black ties. Promising I would remember. Their claws.

I want. I need to remember how much it hurts.

I was sitting with my right foot tucked into my crotch and my left knee propping up my chin. Surveying the carrion the day had left. Vultures in every thought. Dead things howling inside their stomachs. Lullabies for sleeping alone. Or with the things that only love you back when you're lost in them.

With things that pluck the life from your skin one hair at a time. But you never feel it until they get to the last one.

I was sitting the same way I am now, but there was a difference. A deadline in his voice that indicated there wasn't much time before this chair. These walls. Were the only things that would ever know who we'd been.

I never thought he understood me, but I did think he'd made the most effort. To see the words not as they were written, but from where they came. The trick is I never expected much from him.

The secret was.

He knew this.

I turned the key. Coaxing my enemies. Cylinder in a lock. Tumbling in earnest toward a combination that might release. The rapunzel from her tower. The princess from her pea. Baiting the fairy tales with ample hooks. Coloring in the pages of children's books.

Thwarting the angle he had taken. Positioning the camera.

There are mice. And there are men. And there are reasons to love either one.

What comes after nothing? Progress sewn into knotted brows. Snowflakes seducing the porchlight one echo at a time. Little hookers in broken heels. Spilling the purple from the decanter we call January. Loose undergarments sculpting the lycra fists her clothes punched into her ass. The new year already old. The cold never comes late enough for heavy beds that sigh against walls weighted with lovers' skins.

The seams in the glass pitch forward as I tilt my grip toward the ceiling. Sailboats lurched by the rage of the wind. The choices turn their backs. Tired of listening to the rape of the headboard as it skirts the walls. Barely bleeding enough to reach the floor.

The seams, they were always there. Promising to burst. Anxious counters on the time bombs my life had determined. Smelling of beer and lubricant. Prostituted by the smallest consequence. Dandruff on their shoudlers.

The veins. They cresendo to daggers. Stabbing it all away. In kissing scissors of touch. Callous whetstones of men. Honing the fever. Until only the disease is left.

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I assumed he'd see the grief in the bias of my cheekbones. The split of my lips. The cold wind to be my biographer. The new year my fiance.

We being. The discards of so many intimate encounters. Leftovers. Broken ladders up to heaven.

In the blue. In the green. The whisper of life amongst so many graves. The stones. Weighted shadows marching calmly. Sold to their prayers.

The snake in our ammonia. Cleansing its venom.

Liars and friends still undecided.

There are handcuffs on every moment. Doesn't mean they're guilty. Innocent until we're not. Innocent every morning. Guilty by night.

Painting doors in places they don't belong. In eyes of glass. In windows sealed shut. Scratching in the void. As easy as touching pen to paper with a frost-bitten hand. As easy as keeping the blank page close enough to grab. Making sure there is always something hard beneath to lean against.

Little looks of crayon in his glance. Cornflower blue and copper. Static demons trapped in the hells we name after euphoria. Small stones in his throat. Games of hopscotch on splinted shins.

Numbers big enough to see even with our eyes closed.

Pictures I never knew I could draw telling me who I was.

I saw the light go out across the street. The eye of a distant god foiled by a sneeze. It was just about midnight in sodom. We were only waiting on gamorah to catch up. Drunk on pussy I almost believed he was in love.

I heard the sirens not too far away. The velcro tear of lives being torn from their worlds. Still, the mind is a benevolent dictator. Always persuading us we've never needed the things we've lost.

He was my confessional. Garage sale soulmate. Happiness purchased from someone else's loss. I was so far from myself it seemed I might actually become someone else. All those craters from such a distance barely pin pricks in the veneer we had laid. Every detective we consulted declared we'd gotten away with it.

Dominoes in the full eclipse of the finger. Hurriedly arranging their dots. Into messages to be found after they've fallen.

Every breath is a tiny climax. Biting on the lip of death. Bringing it ever closer to orgasm.

Everything. Everyone. Is my lie. My delusion. My saturday in the park. Picking cunts like backyard gardens.

Honestly deciding

I traced the claw with a charcoal pencil. As though I were an artist. Or had, at some time been. Maybe. I knew the pictures so well. Especially when I knew they were being looked at my someone else.

Strange eyes like little razor blades devouring the image. Insofar as it had ever been mine. Little lies putting handcuffs on my heavens. Stalling the messages I had sent to absentee lovers. Curdling the bed we'd almost slept in together.

Arguing with the concrete as it hardens about my limbs. Milquetoast gradients in this grey rainbow. Cold pie on the windowsill. Not worthy stealing.

There's still time. To forget. To paint the walls like we're colorblind teenagers. Or just regular people without nothing left to regret.

He was drooling. Sermons written in saliva. Each swallow a chapter. Hotels made of dirty snow and footprints left behind. Cold rooms full of coal eyes measuring me with their stares. The thick mascara of broken men depositing their black tears on the beds we've shared. As though there were anything other choice.

Sucking down the smoke in shallow inhales. Outside the place. Outside the shopping bag full with static manipulations of frailty and flesh. The sandpaper of the wind eroding corners once sharp. Oncoming headlights puncturing my debate.

If I was wrong I'd find out soon enough.

I bundled the comforter into my arms and quietly nursed it down the staircase. To be cleansed. Remembering the blizzard outside as my feet made contact with the ground floor. So many similarities to what had just transpired upstairs.

I watched the water as it pissed into the tub. Turning my red blush into a slutty pink lipstick. A filthy waterfall of consequence. A snowman. Caught in the thaw. Holding out its shaky twig arms to catch its falling smile.

She removed the strap from her top in a spasm of adolescence. Revealing no bra. Only little indications of breasts hiccuping from her chest. Sighing like a hurricane as she crawled out of the remainder of her clothes.

New enough it would seem to trust the numbers on the pages. Middle of the story. Maybe more. She welcomed the scissors to her groin. As they cut a garland of yeses from her singular no.

Tomorrow dabbing in its fingerpaints. Thumbprints delineating margins of skin. Signatures at the bottom of the bed. Endorsing situations not intended to be cashed.

He spoke his words like they were wilted lettuce. Born and growing and dying at last. Unconsumed. No salad fork. No dressing. For anything he had left. Big leaves blushing brown against the press of time. Slowly. The way moisture darkens ceilings in varied stages of rainfall.

Searching for a pattern. To lead me back to the source.

I took small bites at first. Changing forks often. Tunnelling toward the bottom of the plate in forced gulps. The fat lady in an opera of sex. Singing so loudly to an empty audience.

Searching.

Those wilted leaves for an indication of life. Chewing on those brown spots.

A dozen tip toes into the strut his heels touched the floor again. I smiled at his failure and offered him a drink.

These were the flat tires we'd race on. The brakes we never checked. Because taking life for granted is the only thing that ever results in it seeming impressive. These were the lessons I'd taught myself on so many walks alone. Head down. Hands deep in pants pockets grabbing at nothing. This was the karma I'd designed. Abuse breeds humility. Neglect fortifies connections.

People will hurt you. That is how you know you love them.

People will hurt you.

And you will hurt them.

In the pavement shimmering with speed. In the trees that parted as I came near. An escape. Away from everything.

A process of becoming chronic. Incurable. Wanting to be.

The air was quilted with frost. Stitched precisely into every pocket of breath. Thick and paralyzing. The night was panting softly. While our hamburgers cooked. A wounded animal trembling amongst the taller weeds. While our fries tangoed in their hot, yellow bath.

I said stupid things. Speaking out loud the conversations that are usually reserved for my head. I watched myself and him. The whole restaurant. Flopping as fish on a boat's deck in a futile exercise of self-preservation.

When you're there in it you don't know you're dying.

It's the watching that reveals where we really are.

There was an auction of sorts. Well, there was bidding anyway. On things we had never previously wanted. In the lie of sleep we touched. Index finger pointing out the labels on our happiness.

In the smokey clouds that blossomed overhead. Between the crowded booths our voices changed. Petty reasons became excuses.

And it was almost easy to leave. Culling victory from the failures as is needed to survive them.

Beginning the lesson all over again. That I'm the same person I was before.

No less lost since having been found by those men.

We were caught in a crease of fat on the belly of this town. Now a city. Completely official. It has matured so poorly. Always with the sirens. Scrambled eggs and heart attacks for breakfast.

There's everywhere to go and nothing to do. We were supposed to have been alone by now. Discarded like the empty bungalows that choke out from the sand in perfect intervals. All the small towns grow big eventually. And all their children turn into city people. Creating scenarios of escape while they sit in the traffic jams.

I want the countryside where I can ride my bicycle safely down the center of the road. I want the crickets to sing me their lullabies.

I want the emptiness of the city without the weight.

The evolution of a metropolis is an ugly documentary. A cold education in just how many people we're making.

He had so many ways to tell me he loved me, but he could never decide on the right one. So I tried on a few dresses, but never bought any. The sand rose to meet our terms of surrender. The bottles waited for our response. While the drunk man at the corner of the bar cautioned us to remain strangers.

If we could.

He'd say it in words when he was drunk. He'd say it in emails when I wouldn't answer. He'd sing in it through his fingernails as they raked my skin. He'd say it and I'd tell him he was wrong. Citing the the pills as evidence. A jury of condoms left to determine.

How wrong we were.

When I take too much I actually end up with extras. Because there are portions for even the most flagrant of manias. The sturdy erections of the night before still waiting to come.

Even though we had both arrived at the same place. At the same time. His map strangely had different roads than mine did. His dots connected sneaking through from the other side. Infiltrating the blunt outlines we had only partially filled in.

He would pop suddenly into my existence. A remake of some old song I'd listened to before. Sounding the same and different. Old vinyl records asthmatically wheezing out a song I could almost remember. Was there not so much mucus between us.

An erection of cliches stabbing at the entrance to borrowed utopias.

I was working my way toward Febraury. A lifetime disguised as only a momth. Pitching pennies into sighing bottles. Wondering where the genie hid. Making wishes that had already wished me a long time ago.

She's acoustic. She has strings running from her eyelids to her toes. And every time I try to breathe I'm assaulted by her song. Eager fishermen casting their lures from the edge of her heart. A crippled pantomime failing the stage. Tearing the curtains apart. While the lights snore unimpressed. While the boards creak in a cold prayer that wishes it could ask for what it really wants.

In the fence posts sturdy with cement she listens as it dries. In the ocean she draws with pastel sticks. Coloring in the waves by the number. By the threat.

Of all the lies we'll never share.

Confident she can repay the uptopias lent to her.

Sometimes she goes out of her way to give me a compliment. As if there's some bruise on my forehead that suggests. However subtle. That I feel less than adequate.

Sometimes she's a glue. Sometimes she's a solvent. Just as likely to create a bond as she is to destroy one. Small time tanning salons at the back of our throats constantly making rag dolls out of ghosts.

While the eyelashes on the light draw pin stripes along the staircase. Toadstools blossoming in the corners of my footsteps. While I sneak, all too noticed another pitbull into my tired head.

There is a formula I'm sure. To calculate. The distance between the first kiss and the last one. Taking into account Probable Dementias. And all the people between who make them feel that much farther apart.

Two lovers carefully remove the lids from their plastic utopias. Two small pieces of candy finally free of their wrappers work their way passed the lips of the bed. Melting into one confection by the chemistry of lust.

Their spigots heaving dry orgasms as the desert spread below the surface. Cunning virus never showing its symptoms until after we are dead. Two bodies. Four hands. Four feet. Stucco on the darkness. Snagging every stray breath. Twenty fingers. Twenty toes. Bourbon on the breath of the pillows. Sweetening the poison.

Pointed nipples yawning at the ghosts on the ceiling. Open bridges. As sound trades punches with the sight. Ruptured skin frantic with the necromancers of pleasure. The fetal fist of liars pounding on my door.

In her overalls. In their plethora of pockets. A cryptogram of people she can't decipher.

Not then. Not now.

There were tall jack o lanterns in the darkness. Grinning sight out to every other car. There were snowflakes trying to be a storm. The way it always melts when it's too warm. Desire like a Jello mold never still in our hearts. Candles at the back of our throats as we quietly laughed at ourselves.

The comforter had barely moved. The moon hadn't slept. When I finally woke up buried in that bed. This chair. My coffin.

Blind eulogies spelled out in flowers dead. Bald apologies arranging their wigs. Close enough. Closer than I've ever been.

To knowing.

Who I am.

Close enough.

To know. There are still skeletons. Calm mannequins filing up this flesh. The People I Don't Know.

In the closet we called a pantry. Sustenance as geometric as our hunger was. Packaged in boxes and sold two for the price of one. On the tired shelves. In the fallopian darkness life waited for the seal to be broken.

In the bedroom we called a home. Beds as empty as we were. Old nags chauffering the saddle in the gauges of their spines. Chastity belts in every wrinkle. Photographs of time taken by the skin.

The stop-motion animation that is life. Every tiny movement an elaborate production. Fits of juliet in every plaintive touch.

In the condom in the wastebasket. Evidence. Of my future drowning in the vomit from a penis.

There was a mini skirt. Black gauze bandage for my crotch. There were panty hose. To hide the hairs I'd missed. Indebted to every nuance of the feimine. A child always looking up at everyone. Too naive to ask them to bend down. A matchstick too on fire.

There were cat tails. To balannce with. And whiskers to guide me through the smaller corridors. While I wondered after destiny. The plans of gods I'd never believe in.

Left with only men. And the ways I have left to seduce them.

Turning lifetimes into alarm clocks. Relentlessly waking up the dead.

In quiet coughs that seem to promsie resolution.

You have to start precisely at the midway point between beer number two and three. But that place is mutable depending on where the day has left you. You have to regulate the flow of inspiration based upon the distance between your fingers and your heart.

Make yourself the devil and you're bound to be hated. Everything is political. Even family. Make yourself an angel and they'll only wait for you to rescue them. Everything is about redemption. Even sex.

I was an addict from the day I was born. There was always the emptiness. And I've used up so many ways to kill its drum. Each one at the onset softening the thunder. Only to eventually make it so much louder.

You have to be ready to create when it hurts enough. And know when to let it go once the numbness lets you stop.

Maybe it's four. Maybe it's six. There's no way to know until you're done.

It was going to be Monday soon and I wasn't happy about it. It was going to be Monday every week for the rest of my life. Sunday and Saturday too. Every day without rest. Feasting like buzzards on my corpse.

It was bound to rain. And snow. Everything that happens. When you're living. Listening to the world beating on your door. In ticklish sobs. The ringing. The messages. Everything you wish you could forget you were ever a part of. The ladder as you remember life. in all its futile stages. Rung by rung climbing toward the bottom to start over again.

The plastic forks piercing the lettuce. As picnics happened under your skin. The paper plates sweating our desserts right through to the glass. Transparency outbidding touch. In a coup of expectations.

The clean napkins still on the table. The empty take out containers the most metaphor I could accept.

Down.

Frozen steps in front
of dark houses.

across.

pebbled streets
beside heavy mailboxes.

at the bus stop
on the curb.

doused in stones
from lonely walks.

the passenger counts
the chagne in her hand.

Listening to the rain knifing through the air. Shallow cuts. Waiting on line. Conveyor belts carrying our lives to the register. Drowning in the levity of hating ourselves. And everyone who should. Hate themselves, but is too stupid to know it.

Impatient. Conversations with the weather. Stopping and starting with the slightest recession. The rain beating its drum on the outside of our houses. Where we remember the world having once been.

Welcome mats licking the dirt from lover's shoes. In doorways we don't own anymore. In yellow buttons on frail, frail mesh. Of the many lights out there that are still looking for the end of the darkness. In wet laughs that carry from house to house as nightmares are dispersed amongst friends. In hollow barks the rain falls. Smuggling the weather into our hearts.

I was nursing the lion. I was telling myself it didn't matter. Healing was a symptom of the disease. In tepid sheets. The calm dominion of fetid lives. Sour diplomats mediating the perfect lisp of one night stands.

I was sure. As sure as I'd ever been.

Of the antidote. The cure. How near it rested to the source. The things that makes us bigger are oftten the same things that tend to make us small. The people we want to save us usually just show how lost we are.

With so many ways to die. How to choose?

With so much I still don't know about you. Where to begin?

Drawn into this virus some call love. Held by this cancer that once was us.

It's stronger than I am.

The doll leaned in close. With a sharp needle between the threads. Of her suspicion. That he was gone. Accumulating as it does. Knitting. In heavy sweaters. Truths we know belong closer than we keep them. Gnarled fingers still agile enough for the tasks of tantrums. Feeble lives unbecome by circumstance. Emotion at the top of its tower. King Kong's holding tiny loves in giant fingers. As a million little bullets make the giant small.

Stitches. Knots. Threads. Assuming the efforts of broken hearts. Solitude my only measure of what is not alone. Tonight. And every one. Addiction my only proof. That there was something. Someone. Prior to this.

The more I let them go the closer they are.

It's a pun of the heart. A careless boomerang. The words we say to them coming back to us. If I had enough drugs I'd admit that I've only wondered if I could love them. As much as I love the idea of losing them.

The hiccups of sex had me swallow somethings I never would.

People scoff at depression. Assuming it's an attitude rather than a conditon. They devour the words and the images it creates. Forgetting the person. The veins. The fingers. That lift its glass to her lips. In her thirst. In her desert she befriended the sand. In her delrium she named the letters that made the words. Every little piece of the conversation having its own identity. Its own reason to listen.

Long after everything had already been said.

She kept a diary. In cigarette butts and broken dishes. Metaphors in every inhale. Adjectives sealed in the glue used to reassemble the shattered pieces. She kept the nouns in her pillowcase while she slept. She kept a diary. Everyone does. In every pore of their skin. Every handshake. Glance. And scratched itch.

She kept her pages in little piles. Black lipstick on white kisses. Sonograms of thoughts only partially born.

She kept a diary. Of every face. Every breath. Though most of it remained unwritten. Colorless. Flavorless gelatin molds shimmering on a stage of fractured plates. At the back of a broken refrigerator. She kept everything. Her brain idly tracing every slope of light that broached the glass. While she did nothing. Looking out from behind it. Seeing only her reflection.

A diary. In every glance. of each stranger. A diary. In every person I'll never know.

There were toadstools in his cardigan. Little mushroom caps blotting away from his skin. There was life to tell what we could have. And touch to tease of things we never would.

With a confident nod it turned the price upside down. Spilling all the liquid. The fortunate lies. Tied to the sediment. Rusty pitchforks in search of a savior. As though truth were a swipe of lipstick across hungry lips. And these callous epiphanies were a gown waiting to be fitted. Overcome by the path from then to now.

He had a paper scalp. Tiny origami sculptures in every single hair. I used to unfold them and start to write. Random words. With an urgent disinterest too alike the wheeze of a ventilator as it keeps our dead loves within our grasp. Love is like the crevice tool on a vacuum. It finds the dirt in the deepest recesses of our lives.

I would knead his skin. Like an artist's eraser. Massaging out every mistake. Catching the bristles that would fall from the brush. As it hummed over the canvas of the moment. So far from the colors it wanted.

I used to draw. When the stab of pencil points were still sharp in strangers' glances. I used to trace. In permanent marker. The voids around them. the nothing that proved they had been there.

I was an asterisk. An anything. A nothing.

Spitting on the breadcrumbs. Pissing on the path. Angry that the forest still didn't know who I was.

Cotton pillow case covers sighed softly under the weight of her elbow as she propped her head up to look him in the face. There was what some might call music behind them. In a little attache case of yesterday's choices. She liked it because it was aggressive like she was sometimes. And still had some reticent undertone. The edge of the mattress flirting with the tuck of the sheets. In hushed arguments over the theology of sex. Flesh versus thought. She would forget to feel sometimes. When they would touch her. There would only be the dense storm cloud of orgasm gagging. About to vomit.

And when it was over. And she was crouching over the puddle it had made she would try to remember what she was thinking then. Or if she had been thinking at all. Hungry children in front of restaurant windows all she could conjure. Their eyes melting the glass between their stomaches and some old man's fillet mignon. Baked potatoes laughing out their heat against a chilly fist of sour cream. Their eyes devouring the image of satisfaction in hurried gulps. Like throwing up in reverse. Heaving it down in retarded chokes. Every moment gliding on the ice rink of bile that wore her throat.

There was a certain comfort she found in the nausea. A warm kettle of tears to bathe in when the cotton was cold.

You're not starting a new life so much as just finishing up an old one. Octopuses spilling from the garden hose in a galaxy of arms. Every one pointing in the same direction. Caterpillars polka dotting the bottom of every eave. Sweating out their tiny comas that promise to make them whole. Like we do when there's still enough beer left.

Or some other ample shadow to blot out a big enough portion of the square. Where our pawns find themselves segregated from their bishops. And rooks. Flaunting this desperate chess match we pretend is the pursuit of happiness.

Square by square. Fumbling toward the middle. The crease in that cardboard tableau where all these long suicides have a name.

There are parts of the moment that get lost in memory. Integers in turmoil. Decimal places that stretch further than willingness. All these years. The formula that yields this present. Like pi it cannot be fully calculated.

My hand was jogging in place over the lines in the paper. Grunting as it curled the heavy barbells of the empty spaces. So many years lifting those weights. And never. Ever. Getting any stronger.

I could hear them breathing all the way downstairs. The profound senses of the lonely gloating again. Embellishing every whisper with the tick of a clock counting toward nowhere. And I would reason with my two halves. The woman and the girl. The white and the yolk. Fretting obsequiously. Panicking silently over the stability of my shell.

Rending the books from their cardboard captors I gave my cigarette a second glance. Tucked the beer bottle neatly into my tits. I had just finished the one written by the suicide. A tome of a comedy. Of fact rather than errors. And I knew there would've been a sequel. He had planned for one. Long before the posthumous Pulitzer. Before the overdose had made him a success.

Some men are failures all their lives. And only geniuses once they're dead. Or maybe it's all men. And most women.

Peeling the stickers from the edges of the jewel boxes I wondered why it had to be so difficult just to hear a song. A rage or two to diffuse my malcontent. Had I ever liked popular music. Manilow. Sinatra? Or had I merely been overwhelmed by the people I'd drooled over. Measuring the nightmares required to grant me access to the one that dreams won't soon forget.

There was promise in his fancy socks. In his wallet. As if age could make an exception. And actually grant wisdom normally reserved for the prophets. I thought a lot about the heated seats as we waited for the light to change on our way to Friday's. I thought about how he'd initially greeted me. Boasting of an expensive car high on his list of criteria for a complimentary blow job.

It was the question of the day. How I had to prove I could get everything I never wanted to have. How persuasion had nothing to do with status. And everything to do with dignity. How much of it I was willing to risk.

We played blackjack with our clothes. Panties corroding skin. We played the lottery with our happiness. Scratching off so many useless tickets.

It came and went without much ado. As most orgasms will. Shiny ornaments hung from the flesh. Bombastic preludes to the epiphanies of the afterglow.

The twilight zone was on. That calm visionary smoking an unfiltered cigarette. telling the future one irony per episode. And the honeymooners too. Spousal abuse used to be funny. Kind of still is. In black and white.

There are too many answers available to us now. So many things there's no reason for us to know. Because we can't change them. All we can do is know it's wrong and wonder when or if it will stop.

It was a fossil in the seat of my pants. Someone dug up. A skeleton from another era. He tried to put back together. Find a form in all this mess. It was just a blemish in the amber were the insect died.

There may still be bones to discover. But what use are they without the meat. The muscle. The reflex that indicates they know we're touching them. Without it we're just molesting mannequins. Assigning different names to a monotonous array of manufactured faces.

We're creatures of consequence. Defined by our delusions of choice. We're artists with so many colors on our palettes, but lacking brushes. Disheartened because the tools of our hearts cosntantly fail us.

You're alright, he said. In a voice that vacuumed all our steps out of the rug. Combing his fingers through my well conditioned hair there was the rumble of lust. Fetal and secure in an empty bed.

Earlier we'd crossed the street from his car and met at the corner. To dine like strangers. Familiarity poured between our toes like concrete left to dry. Making us lovers. On Sunday's. And any time the worlds we cultivated had little use for us.

Shoving our fingers into those leaky dykes. Staving off floods with chewing gum.

Turing the corner on the year in the soft slippers time expressed. While it sat at its drafting board so determined to win our awe. Relentlessly playing the architect to our wrecking ball.

You're alright without me, he said.

The clock boasting pages blank enough. To claim them as my own. Tomorrow nothing more than an abadoned swing aching on a pallid playground.

And like he said. I'm all right.

Being alone.

Angels with grease on their halos. Wings made of Teflon. Sauteing each prayer on the lips of the wind. Breaking lifetimes into bite size chapters. Inventing change where there is none.

Sidewalks in the sun cackling with the footsteps of so many people. And the places they've been. Tombstones of yesterday for us to walk upon. Follow the ghosts on their way to so many unenviable heavens as we can create. One word. One person. One year. After the other.

Dominoes on chessboards. Falliing pawns belying the courtship of their kings. Stories in my fingers. Fragrant truths warming in broken ovens. But I can smell them. Just as if all this time had never passed. And every night was as confident as this one is. That we're no different.