We were stuck watching American Idol. Dividing the fake applause by the real to get our satisfaction quotient. In a collective sigh we all acknowleged Mark Burnett as the anitchrist and ushered in the next set of commercials. Squinting hard to find the shows within it.

If we were wood then we'd be better off. We could splinter. Sneak under people's skin. Infect them with our frail bits of pain. And they'd remember how it feels to be just a small piece of who you were. Plucked out of the same holes you created. Just residue. Evidence. Of which hole we entered. And throough which one we made our exit.

The neat geomoetry that is skin. At any angle it all adds up to same degrees. People layered like lunch meat in a sandwich. Their only purpose to be consumed. The only thing that makes us different is the bread we select. We're all someone else's fuel. Skittish gastanks burping out the miles like drunken parrots. Wondering if they still hear us.

And then we all learned it wasn't Jackson. It was Johnson. And I looked it up just to be certain. Wondering what else we thought we knew.

Outside the dollar store a man asked for directions to Princeton Avenue. He wasn't so much lost as just unsure. He was something out of the seventies. A little superheroish. The alter ego of. In a dull old Cadillac and wearing sunglasses in the rain.

It wasn't a hard sell to get him going from where we were. He was already headed in the right direction.

Just strange, getting asked for directions in February when you live next door to the ocean.

It used to be called the Laurelton Circle. Where our superhero was going. But now it's just a grandiose intersection. Bloated with u-turns and delayed greens. Keep right and you're headed for the big houses with lawns made of sand.

Stay in the middle and you'll hit the little cities we keep between the saltwater and the grass. Colloquial emissaries to the tourist trade. All old buildings surrounded by shiny new parking meters.

Go left and you're back where I first saw him. Looking like the nobody you see in so many comic books. The hero everyone's always looking at, but never can find.

I always wonder after I tell someone how to get there if they've found it.

The sarcasm came in stitches. Large needles opening old wounds. Petticoats of scars puffing up loose skin. Putting life into parenthesis. The chicken with its beak in its hand. Flirting with whores happiness pimps to all the barren apostles still dead enough to listen.

Tiny hammers in every jab of his tongue. Little pebbles under my breath. Building their boulders.

Frail instigations of worlds we'll never know. Pale exorcisms for those tainted by tomorrow. In gravelly gowns made of circumstance. In nightmares too ambivalent to fear. I sleep. Still awake enough to hear.

The hiss in the ears of deaf gods. The prowl of life in the throats of mute prophets.

The words proof enough.

By then everything is damp. And it all feels cold. Braids of vicodin throughout the mattes in her hair. She looks at us with exaggerated pupils. She laughs. A malignant ballad through the tremble in her lips.

Picking stabs from the vein like ready fruit. Turning solids into juice. With bashful hammers that want to wait. For a better time to kill. With open bottles unafraid to take the stage and sing along with the stale karaoke life farts out.

Dying melodies stabbing through the guts of a sentimental song. In the voices of characters we used to claim were ours. In the thick black outlines cartoons draw around their victims.

villains. everyone.

We watched the second hand have its stroke.

An old man. Someone's grandfather. Tearing off their diaper and shitting everywhere.

The lamp in the corner asked how long we'd be needing it on. Flaunting its spectacle to every corner of the room. Omniscient spotlight of eternity molesting its disciples. knowing we were alive only in the most nefarious sense. Cold grease paint pretending eroding faces. Sad clowns framed in flesh and blood. The fractured memoirs of emotional vagabonds. Written in the keen stare of the light bulb.

In the dust on the dresser. In the wear of the clothes inside its drawers. In the muted tv across from the sinking bed. A letter. Or rather a series of letters written long before we'd ever met.

Addressing ourselves now from before we were us. Plastic men shivering on poorly painted chess boards. Tripping over every square. Tumbling. Rivers of people. Of experience. Smoothing every edge. Until it's impossible to remember anything but a vague sense of remission causing the cancer to shrink back below our skin.

Letting the days comes as they always insist. Fractures of life deep fried in our thoughts. Crisp and golden. Greasy and hot. Burning the roofs of our mouths as we try to swallow.

The book was read. Stencilled jaggedly into the bone of her brain. The dull hopscotch pebbling calm over each square. Designating the practical portions of her heart. Like the failed time lines that wore us as children. Ironing the fetid capes for our former heroes.

In little sips the world dares to focus. Disregarding its broken lens. In big gulps the happiness succumbs to dementia. Frail old woman forgetting her future. Of infancy all over again.

In practiced lies she charmed the river. To give the concrete chance to dry. All her pseudonyms finally telling. Jackhammers turning concrete into pudding.

We crawl in diapers full of feces. We learn to walk bobbing against the arms of strangers. Clown faces taller than our worst nightmare. We run with shoes unlaced. Hoping to fall.

The lamp made a green sun on the wall. The construction paper sort a child might draw. The refrigerator wheezed as I tore into its chest. Grabbing a capillary then leaving it alone again with its asthma. The green sun looked familiar as it blinked at me from its very beige canvas. A differential spotlight for all those moments famous only for how quickly we forget.

The green sun. A cartoon eye staring at the anvils over my head.

The kitchen floor was baked frigid and flat against the earth below. Recylced swamp constantly exhaling the stench of my every confession. Written in footsteps too quiet to hear. Lit by green suns too close to show.

The treason that writes us. When we're fumbling with the chilled cardboard hampers from which we retrieve our wardrobe. Dressed in trails of stale breadcrumbs our lives have left.

Lost inside walls so beige.

the stench of repetion swollen inside every breath.

She turned on her cardboard heels and doused him inh her only thought. I'm never lonely so long as it hurts. Just like putting out a fire before it starts.

I'm lips. Drawn in crayons without labels. I'm a droning cunt always vacant. I'm brick red. I'm peach. Words describing things that can't be seen. Microscopic mirrors resounding every resignation.

She took the glass between her fingers like a candy bar pouting red. Hunting for the stop sign pain promises.

He was calm. Still not reflected in the glass.

As she she pushed the pieces deeper into her arm.

She was looking at the floor. Tracing the footstep. A calloused map.

Of all the plasces we can never go again.

She was watching the eyebrow on the night rise and ebb. While pieces of tomorrow winked on the horizon like so many distant sailboats on a voyage much longer than the wind. The perfect certainty of hopelessness rigid as the wood of a crucifix.

The hours. Each of them cascading in an endless sneeze of unravelling bowels. The more you pull away the more that your insides fall out.

She was taking her life in doses. In orange cylinders with typewritten instructions on how much and how often to she was to be saved.

The hours. Each of them. Stabbing into the next. A series of so many tiny toothpicks to animate the dead.

The snarl of the zipper was all the love she needed for the time being. Copper monsters with claws made of penis. There's a fairy tale in every inch of skin. Rapunzels with ladders of hair begging to be saved. Witches with their chocolate architects. To tempt the hungry.

She wanted to be swallowed by the wolf, but he had already eaten.

The croak of afterward like a crippled frog. Listlessly bartering for flies it doesn't even want.

There were trolls at the backdoor as she coutned the passing headlights. Turtles in their moral races drawing sneakers on anyone's god. The were beds that never came. Stale effigies ironed from the ripe meat of partial orgrams. Poorly intimating the life we shared with it. A beggar's wishing well. Collecting interest on every secret.

There were so many choices.

There were none.

Her book was on the kitchen table. Patiently waiting to be read. The weight of too many winters pulling the curls from her hair. Ambient eulogies in shudders of cardboard. The ambivalent anarchy that is hopelessness.

The messages waited impatiently as she traced her footsteps. From the doorway to the chair. From salvation to surrender. The stoic algebra that is sanity turning wide eyes into calculators.

Her book was on the table, but her eyes were on the stove. As it counted down the seconds untl the pie was done. The apples all in an uproar. The crust mad with indignation. As she scorned their warmth in favor of the cold out there.

The nothing turns like a screw through this cork. Not opening this bottle to the world. But allowing the world to drain it.

Or else it was always empty. And now it's so certain. Inoperable cancers tell their stories in squeaks and dribbles. Our attempts to live. Incurable diseases. Draw the outlines for our portraits.

And we are all artists. immortal because we know why. Or once knew. Why we're still alive.

The coma close enough to marry.

There are ways to measure the absence, but I've never cared for their methods. Plastic devil's horns on heavy heads. The sequins in their stare unwilling to negotiate with my pain. That I thought was ours way back when. In the tiny orgasms of love that led me to believe I was that small.

You think too much.

You reason like a corpse does. Death the beginning, not the end. You tell yourself this death is the last one. Like very addict will. So many times. You purchase your loves at the backdoor. From cheap prostitutes. As the lonely must. Swim through those puddles of sour sex to find the new.

Rationalizing your grave in so many metaphors. Wearing those other universes just as they would wear you.

Hoping you won't be found.

There were onions in the pot. Hissing like bad dreams do even through the first cup of coffee. There was sweat on her spatula as she shuffled the ingredients through the flame. Eagerly pushing the raw out of her way.

There was talk of purgatory and liasons with dementia. As we scoured through the scraps for soemthing to eat. Hungry enough to put it in our mouths. But too optimistic to keep from throwing it up. It's all story when taken slowly. The lazy paragraphs of life come into focus in a rush of humility.

It might be noon instead of midnight. Since I can't see from here if the clock says am or pm. I might be in so many elsewheres wondering if there are other me's. A complete range of me's from the most miserable to the happiest separated by only our obsession with ourselves.

Just as Roddenberry promised. Just as Star Trek iterated time and again. This is one outcome. This is one of the lives I could've lived. Somewhere there are better me's. And somewhere else there are worse ones.

You saw the door. You were it for a while. Cold itch sewing fingers together. Proofing the hallucination in lazy jaws. The afternoon. The carnivore in pantyhose. The young treading mildly on fond waves. We're water. We're the ocean. Humble waves succumbing to the sand. In small mutilations. Frail carnivals in their selfish parades. Broken yolks. Heavy whites. At the edge of the pan. The freedom of surrender found in a stiff dashboard.

Touching the glass. The face on the other side of its chapped lips. The excuse trickles in through seams in the knife.

Yawning the words. Beating the train tracks. Seasoned gods assemble their speeches. As if we knew what worship could mean. Other than waiting. Imagining when we'd die.

A million throats ready to swallow. What we couldn't keep down. A million answers to that one question. why?

The dog burying its shit. During a quiet dance. The vice scratching at its stone. Soft saviors tucked under our pillows. Imagining we don't know how close we came.

She'd look for them. As she habitually cracked her jaw. The chirp of moments dead in their cradles. The slatted walls of despair that let only enough light through to see how dark it was.

Close her eyes. Tuck back her hair. Adjust the volume on the depression until it is music. Wipe the loose skin from her glasses. Brush the moisture from her eyes. In the fragments of clarity that erupt inside her chamber. Moments gather in tepid persuasions. Of all the little ghosts she's scratched with crayon. Colorful scars on the empty paper she wears as her skin.

The conciliatory accusations of impotent men. When roses fail her. When lies undress. Those bones are open to interpretation. Left to herself translating the sour monologues the curtains have kept.

In pragmatic labors they tallied the pleasure. For tax and wager. Two tongues. One lie. A soiled capsule looking over the cliff of her esophagus. As though it were a high rise. And all the drugs in her stomach a ghoulish audience applauding. As she contemplated where the bottom could be hiding.

The bed had never been in the corner. Still the corner had always been in the bed. Clean sheets smelling of an arrogant smile I could only remember during masturbation. Life is the ugliest metaphor of all. The siren wrenches us awake. The silence tuck us in. In careless cycles.

We are the carrots on someone else's stick. The eye in their tooth as they bite down on the gristle.

There is no poetry for what I've become. Nothing but ugly words can know. Small beds made smaller still by the absence of strangers.

There are few differences between an alcoholic and a poet. A small equation of little consequence. Methods of determining N may vary, but the result is constant. As hard as I try not to, I will remember. Everything that led to here. And I assume will take me away form it.

I've been up and down those stairs. At all hours. In all manner of sobriety and drunk. I've been through every bottle one word at a time. And I still don't know what they want.

There are only nominal differences between a liar and a friend. The only way to tell is to let them lie to you. Trust those jackals on your shoulder. Believe they're still as rabid as you remember.

I've always been very much at the mercy of my phases. Certain silent alarms alternately fire in my brain. Art, prose, sex, poetry, love. And I pour myself into the obsession until a new one is loud enough to draw me away.

When I was younger I drew all the time. Face after face. Graphite replicas of all my idols from the music magazines.

A little bit older I began to write. I'd stay awake in 36 hour marathons filling single subject notebooks with bile about lost hope. And the other parasites that always seem to find young, inexperienced people.

In my twenties it was all about people. Sex and dating. Chat rooms and their various victims my pulpit as I preached with heavy breath about living like life isn't a threat.

By the time thirty had arrived I was a poet. The real kind. An alcoholic. And I'd finally found the one obsession that could trump all the rest.

In the archives. In the true back of her head she knew there was a page. Words scratched into the paper by an empty pen. Welts dug deep into the thighs of darkness. Through the veil of its pantyhose. Through the spark of its willing cunt. She lobbed her trivias at the glass in easy knuckle balls. And began preparing for the swing.

In poorly cut diamonds the moment shopped. In clumsily sewn pants the moments sobbed. The slow blink of funerals turning the pavement soft under foot.

In cliches we debated the validity of my disease. The crying clown painting depression flaunted suspect at best. In little lies we wagered. Throwing of money away on those slot machines we call friends. The liar and the lover being the same.

Confident as a severed head. In the slow circumcision he called his love.

Ugly ducklings flirt with loose feathers. Heavy beaks. The humble is truncated in stuttered urges. No. We're not alone.

I was paraphrasing myself. Reading from my wrists. The little notations I'd made there so many years ago. They were still applicable. Sex came in shivers. Like withdrawal does. Sweating out the last molecules of salvation in the vomit and the piss. Independence in shrugs. Unimpressed. As blasé as a pawn broker.

There were expectations as there always are. Silver propagating in those storm clouds. Pythagoras on my shoulder. As the triangle doled out our angles.

It's simple geometry. Why we're alone.

Loose siding never made a house fall down, but it never helped to keep it standing either. That's what he was. A contrivity of rooms all soldered too close while the ground on which they stood struggled to move.

I always looked forward to saying good night because it meant we were together for another day. We'd put the lid back on that jar and go to sleep thinking it was still ours. I'd dream soft dreams of mercenary fairy tales that took no prisoners.

We'd lay there afterwards in the scoop of the moon as it stripped down to its underwear. Its ass glowing in the failing fluourescence of reason. Its big eyes turning the window dark. Every hello another diaper soiled. Tiny comas filling the spaces between choice and surrender.

I'd always wake up from them the same. Not understanding why everything else was able to change. The cold science of lovers too rigid to convince.

There were moments where forever unhooked its bustier and dared to breathe. The clock set its price. We neogiated briefl for a kingdom neither side possessed. The looking up is easy. Imaginign how high.

It's the looking down that seems to serve no purpose other than to remind us how high we were. Maybe that's life being sagaious. Or maybe it's just random. Like everything is.

Deft Solomon's supply us our past. In perfect divisions.

There are random letters and there are ran dom letters. Some make words. Or ciphers to be solved. Turned into fertilizer like animal shit is. Others just don't have or don't want to be decrypted.

We had snatched the last of the summer off of the stillest branch. I remember looking up at him so high on that ladder and wondering not if, but when he'd fall. A curious type of deju vu where the situation is alien, but the outcome so familiar. I guess you could call it random. Since everything is.

There are cycles that yield warmth. The flower spawn. The sun sweats all over us from the grind of its treadmill. And for that little while we can stop.

I want less.

The majority of people work toward the accumulation of things. Better things. More of them. I want less.

To wake up to a sparse room. Walls scantily clad with the beginnings of madness. A song lurking in the corner. Its lips on fire. A movie grinning from the ceiling with lidless eyes. A contingent of bottles on the desk. To cheat the word out of my coma. The supercilious pathology of depression.

There's so always more to want. Always something better. Judiciously circumstance rations our rewards for the rare occasions when the right buttons are pressed. That's what I see in other people. The desire to complete the task because of the what they'll get. The more.

The infinite labyrinth some god decided to call more. and stuck us inside to see if we'd ever admit there was no exit.

There must be more. This I know. Because there are so many places it could be hidden. And all the people I have known, it's what they trust. What they need to know.

But I. I want less.

I wasn't high enough to look down on him, but he was still far away. To tickle the shutter into moving slow. Spitting out his world in an opiate drool. It's not like I ever opened my eyes. Bothered to look. What came after.

The delirium of widows never to love that much. The caution of funerals not to trust the tiemline we can life.

She was chewing on the cloud over her head. A flavorless bubble gum she'd stolen from the mouth of a former lover. Still as pink as the very first touch. In color and nothing more. She was trying to explain the the formula that proved it was time to let them go. Warped by equations of flesh we faltered and failed to carry the remainder.

She put the eraser to her tongue and knew the taste. A forgiveness so familiar.

A perfect collapse of the senses. And in it, all the gods I'll ever need.

lock the door behind yourself. gather the notes on sticky yellow squares.

the pig asked why it was eaten while other animals were spared. eat the dog. i'll be your pet. the cow had its attorney on retainer. it's my milk. not yours. my body. my choice. so animal farm. the monkey thumped his bible and said the jackals wear turbans. we'll kill them before they kill us.

and so it was. or became the truth. eventually. when enough of the monkeys began to believe their breast implants and suv's were in danger of becoming extinct.

they all recycled. and bought yellow ribbons for their metal houses. they cast their votes. but only the right ones were counted.

and the monkey said they were succeeding. pointing to the gas pumps and whispering to his friends. see, we're winning.

We watched the trees lazily leaning against the shadows of nearby houses. We examined the red lines down my arm. Tiny parachutes failing to open. Pressing on the sore spots. Firing up the dying skin in little pink jack-o-lanterns. Pitching candy bars into the open wounds. Fumbling with fickle elastic bands that had we had assumed would keep that plastic over our faces.

Every letter houses a globe of reasons too far way to examine. An encyclopedia of questions. There are answers. I just don't want to know. The girth of their pantyhose. The height of their stilettos. Leave the belt in their pants. Let the floor decide whom they'll wear next.

We counted the snowflakes as circumstance pushed us closer. Knowing how winters on the edge of the Atlantic tend to sneak up on us.

I took an ample dose of what most would call high. Letting it be. Admitting I had no control. I took what was left of my goosebumps and upon seeing the tracks decided I had scratched deep enough.

Batman. Bartleby. Hamlet. All profound examples of not being able to let go. It worked out for them. Why not me? Or one at least. Maybe. If rich vigilants are to be an accepted example. Or it worked out for all. Depending on your perspective. Assuming death is always a suitable end.

The phone rang as coy as the way the wind speaks right before it rains. I scooped up the remnants of my diaphragm and began to assemble some scandal a of greeting. Yes. Hello? I'm here. With my gauze around all my words. Like some dressing gown for stubborn ghosts. Yes. I'm still here. Gestating between these four walls. The fetus of a lover you'll never live to see born.

Yes. I'm here. Skull in hand.

she makes noises from the bathroom. her piss applauds her in loud splashes. her stomach folds down the corners of her thoughts. furtive dog ears wince through her brow. as i casually thumb through the pages. the fetal compositions of lovers and poets.

my highlighter dried out in the middle of our conversation. and i was left with what i think she might've said. all the wonderful lies she would've told me. all the broken doorknobs we would've turned and opened. in a Calvary of mania. in a whitewash of melancholy. the mind is life's greatest treason. or else the other way around. there's no way to know for sure. what is right. what is wrong. about anything.

she tucks the pillows under her head and points to a small dent in the wall.

i ask her what she sees. but she won't say.

there's just the sound of the heat going off. to think for a while how cold we should become. there's the pitch. a fastball. right over the plate. there's the bat in her hands. loud enough to wake her up. but she won't swing.

not tonight.

the virgin galloped in her popcorn dress. salted like the air is when the wind is fierce. tiny explosions blossoming in every her every limp. feet detached. Skeletons on top of skin. the child meted her stories carefully. as to keep the world from noticing. she'd made them all up. for selfish reasons.

to give the void a chance to grow back. and make the world insignificant. like it had been before this.

he always thought i was different. but i was the same as anyone. just more aware of what it meant.

to be ordinary.

Twelve steps later I hadn't gone anywhere. Fragile urns swapping ashes between the dead. Lubricating the awkward intercourse sobriety has with its strays. Eyes straining on the picture to find the lines that make it whole.

Time goes off like a camera's flashbulb. Turning all our subjects red. Ample follies beat the batter into men. warm ovens rise it. In wagers of surrender. Attitude ignores the alarm as knotted linens tear me from my nightmare.

Of the stolen children I've yet to have. And the feeble bridges we let life build. In broken letters that I'd never stamp. I hold on to the envelopes. The notion that our skin lies to us most of all. And every bandage only encourages it to lie again.

There's no way to gauge. How much further it was.

Saturdays swell like sweated legumes. Church mice gnaw the altars. The presumption of sex makes us all gods under certain circumstances.

As evil as we want to be. In little steps. On soft ladders. Served by our failure.

I taste it as I bite my nails. The lips of reason growing fat. In tangles of sex. In fists full of afterwards. Calm peasants scrub the sheets they've only just woken up from. In little sobs they coax the stains out. To lay down and begin the bleeding anew.

I know what every color means. In the riddle every lover insists. In the ease that is hating.

The pouting lips of circumstance exact their wisdom.

From the remnants of who we've loved. Stale dartboards at the back of our throats seduce the silence. Until everything is better left unsaid.

I hate February. The smug way it folds its arm across its chest. As if to imply there is no changing its mind. Ever.

Icicle garter belts keep the siding up on houses. Yeast infections spill from every chimney post. There is a gag in every breath.

Small gods in a classroom of deities piss all over the lessons written on the chalkboard. The stillest algebra. The weather. Makes us small again. We squint to focus those distant equations. But it's still inches away from clarity.

I hate February. How arrogantly it slips between January and March. How morbidly obese each one of its days is. Making the whole year so much longer.

I hate February. How it's always right.

Such beautiful clothes soiled by dirty skin. In the synonym we take to bed. A kiss is statutory rape. When you've been misled. But not when you've let yourself be.

Fucking the halo that beats about her hips. In furtive sobs it does its long division. Empty taxis fumbling with tempting strangers. Their many destinations.

Those people. So many of them. Always going somewhere.

Those frail corsets we call lovers. Cinching their laces. Cold fingers cut their templates from this skin. Patterns is all we are. Knowledge disguised as pleasure.

Fucking amateurs.

In the antonym he called his love. The doors barked to let me in. Conjures of raindrops faulted him sharper than I ever could. A million tiny smiles teasing him through the glass. London at dusk parading its pale women in their sundry gowns. Servitude all in the circumstance. The grumpy underground choking closed on so many destinations lost in its throat.

The airport at night. Shimmering of dousing travels. People tossed to where they've gone. Swollen eyelashes thrown from their lids. In a fury of satisfaction so incomplete.

The stench of Burger King and dog piss ringing like a school bell in my head. While we cruised Schiphol for cigarettes. In another world. A quaint old life I saw the world through broken stitches. Greasy trains carried us off to places america wouldn't even let us imagine.

Still confused and loyal to the window dressing we call freedom.

We lied to ourselves and said it was the same. Knowing we had to go back.

I don't remember what that's like. The chafe of anticipation rubbing against my skin. The bricks and mortar that build walls between kisses. Did I ever? Static moments whispered through the air like radios between tranmissions. Shy breasts fell out of their coffins in a soft footed drizzle. But that is all that really happened. We sat togoether the poker table, but I never placed a single bet.

Tuck weed caverns boasted their losses. Nothing died. The cold grew thick. And sanctimonious. Preaching each shiver steathily under our clothes. We were wrong for suffering it.. Brown leaves painting on the wind. In scrapes of every traveller gone before them.

I don't remember. Or never knew. It's hard to say. There are breadcrumbs everywhere. Some must be messages while others only coincidence. To be certain I must follow every one.

Hear the future. See the past. Remind the predator of its teeth. Give the dream time to wake us up. Such fertile vices cannot lie.

On another day. When the popsicles would actually melt. In the hierarchy of touch I was thrilled to be at the bottom. The scrape of dead skin being shucked from the meat in a litany of diversions. Splendid scripts turning us into character again. Poised close to the soft switches we name after what we love. Charmed by the hidden wires that send those messages to the core of the machine. Stalling engines once so loud. Lubricating the pistons that push us closer than we intended to be.

Squandering the hows. Obsessed with the whys. Fortune tellers at every grave. Making it impossible to be sure. They're gone. Tumbled stones seeking the river's edge. Before they're smooth enough to forget.

Fists full of pebbles aiming for the water's surface.

The eager sympathy of experience. The frail dowry of trust. Shivering pilgrims greet their rock.

Content just to have found somewhere else to suffer.

Cold vermouth. As dry as a perfect lie puckering your lips. Dirty martinis in tall glasses culled of darkness. And the time spent with it. As neither disciple nor servant. Only a peer. The longest fingernails I've ever grown still don't reach passed the skin. Everything is recessed. Weighted. Balanced against something bigger. Keeping the sting at only a pinch. The impression residual at best.

Dirty socks manifesting sculpture from the seams in the floor. Moaning brightly from their corners about the places we have walked. Every pebble we crushed. Every grain of sand displaced. All those things I've forgotten remembering her.

Little girls in shabby flannel and knotted hair hoping the world wouldn't notice they were there.

There were doctors to tell me I was wrong. And others to tell me how to be right. There were doors with reinforced glass. And windows that couldn't be opened.

Confiscated shoe laces. And tiny drawers in which I hid my thoughts.

Still everything was different then. And the child I was only a stepping stone. Broken blades of grass underfoot as I stomped my way to where I am now.

Bigger drawers. Different clothes. Same windows.

There were suspenders on his eyebrows when he dared to look at where he was. Highways in his frown when he attempted to reason how long he'd stay. I'd get high on the exhaust while he idled in the damp garage between my thighs.

After a little while those wheels would start to spin in place and I knew he'd be leaving soon. The lurch of his momentum spitting pieces of his path back in my face.

I'd lay there afterward. Fingering the skid marks. Gathering the fumes. Sorting them into piles. Day One. Day Two. Etcetera. Stacks and stacks of the same question. The answer only to be found in another pill.

The invisible pictures people draw under our skin. A deluge of ink drowns the empty in its throb. Still the needles they use to get inside it create more holes than they fill.

Pandora, I asked, Will you look inside my box again?

And she did.

I turned into the skid. Letting go of the brakes. Just like they say you should. The threat still hovering. Loud like a helicopter. The end crowning. So red. Like a newborn squeezing from a mother's legs.

We have sex and that's all there is to have. Finishing the infection with a dirty band-aid. Ignoring the itch. Clumsy wings tripping over the bulk of the wind. Tumbling over each other in an avalanche of skin.

I'm not that broken. I'll never be.

Broken enough. For you to love me.

There are only the drinks we split. The skins we stole inside. When our own were too big.

Stranded atop the ferris wheel at a carnival of touch. Everything looking so small. So flat. From how high we were.

The dog on the back porch barely made a sound as it wrestled with the knob. Knowing your limitations makes everything easier.

The rooster was always sleeping when it came time to wake us. Too busy fertilizing eggs that would ultimately be scrambled. So we'd stay asleep and continue dreaming distorted effigies of the night before. Affixing halos to horns. And pitchforks to wings. In the neon colors of sleep. Reasoning. In our frail delirium. That wrong and right would make perfect lovers.

The doorway resting on his shoulders. As wide as a hooker's vagina. The window piercing his smile. Like the scalpel of a drunken surgeon. He was ready to leave. And I was thinking I should be ready to let him go.

Isn't that what lies were created for?

To prove them strangers once they're gone.

This is your life from now on. Baited skin. Fishing for a more appropriate lie. Silent auctions in your head disposing of everything. People used to be the vacations I would take. To get away from myself. Strangers used to be the currency I'd sell myself against.

But there's no gold to guarantee their touch. Once it's gone. It's gone for good.

Fractions in every moment debating denominators. The lines between us choosing our sum.

Rubbings of the window burst from the walls. As they blink frantically. Seeing for the first time.

Everything I'm not.

A chorus of lovers harmonizes my skin. In the elegant suicide every orgasm predicts.

Maybe it's in color. Maybe it's white. Tomorrow. The day after. Silky like sad eyes are when they blink. The crack of joints misaligned in every word we speak. Blades of grass stabbing through wet snow as the winter pulls us into its nightmare again. Tepid glass inhaling what's left of me since the light went off. Fragments of life stolen into sparse manias. Our voices like retarded punctuation marks defile the truth.

Everything is velvet. Everything is soft. The moon bandaged in clouds while we search the sky for something more than words. Solvent in our predicaments. Alledged as they are. Pushing the needle through the rock. Imagining the stitches. As the thread runs out.

The light. I don't bother turning it on anymore. There's plenty to see without it.

The hem. Well, it's close enough. Even though I sometimes still trip on it.

Falling has its charms. Addiction has its wisdoms.

In all the ways that the bad things make us better.

Let's talk about quantum mechanics. The way time is relative to our perception of it. A tense coil fatted around every breath. Tiny capillaries draw the map of life without a savior other than myself.

Gods bitten down like fingernails to the nub. They'd grow back if only I could resist the urge to take more away again.

Let's make the bed. Turning every fold of the sheets into a metaphor. Alluding to the mattress below. Like children shivering in their underwear.

We'll assume for a moment there is sense to it. That these tether balls we punch come back to us for a reason. So that we may bat them away again. And wait. For someone to retaliate.

Let's travel time. Because we can. Turning the past into my personal canvas. As empty as I'd expect of it. Given the weight of expectation. Small gods with small disciples. Drunk on thoughtless prayers.

Let's go back. Giving parents to every orphaned heart. Let's be scientists. So we'll always know when it's impossible.