You go fishing, don't you?

Once in a great while. Just to get away from the data. Prove yourself still organic.

Well, I would. But I don't like fish. Not that I'd mind killing it for nothing if there weren't so many hungry people in the world.

I tried to picture him on his boat. Truing the rudder to his course. But all my mind could come up with was bait. Fish hooks draped in worms. Blind as the earth they were taken from. Sad Madonna's trapped inside the statues of their grief. The art of remorse lackadaisically pissing through her cracking skin.

You go fishing, don't you? One orgasm after the next.

Completely unaware of the hook.

Pulling out another eyelash she checks the mirror to assess the symmetry of her vision. Imagining how different things would look had she worn different clothes. Selected different partners. Applied more mascara.

Little raindrops of sober tapping on the window with a calm regret. Like the pant of dogs left without the windows open while master shops for loose fit jeans.

In my experience they're all loose fit since 1990. Weary pilgrims landing on the plymouth of my hips. Naive enough to think somewhere else could make them different. Trying to remember the pain. Tattered coloring books half filled in. Like the shirts she never wears. Because they don't mean anything to her now.

The pencil of the stairway tracing her in a lurching stare. Looking down As she redraws the maps she made only moments before.

The moral of the story being you're an addict from the moment you let yourself love someone.

You have your good calls and your bad ones. So do I. The mediocre funerals that all moments are. The headlights in your stare fixed on my tail. Everything dying to let us live. Or show us how we might. The sun like paint thinner through the slats in the vertical blinds. Washing away the colors until the everything is bare. In my one moment. In my one real birth. There were bruises, but no blood. There was screaming, but no women. Only angry boys and shy girls. Finding out they weren't as old as they thought they were.

We say it's over, but we never really mean it. Stepping off of the wheel. The haphazard pottery of circumstance. Pulled out of the kiln breakable, but not broken. We say it's over, but we don't surrender to it.

We say we're okay. Because that's what we think they want to hear. Apply the ointment. Drowning in the medicine. We say we're okay. Because what else can I do. He wants to hear it. Hell, maybe I am. Even.

Okay.

Close enough to the eclipse to go blind. But thankful I had the chance to see it.

Me?

I admit.

I'm only alive when I'm dying. And I still wish sometimes you could kill me again.

You are in a nondescript room. There's only a plain desk with one pencil drawer and a lamp on top that won't turn on. You open the drawer to find paper and pencil, but no reason to use them. You change the bulb, but the corpse doesn't respond.

You put your hand into your shirt and crank the accelerator on the cap. The engine opening just enough to stall. A puppet in the stop motion stories the past culls from our lives. Trimming the dead branches. The bruised fingernails of former salvations discarding their roles. A phone call at a time.

You are in a nondescript room. There's only the cursor waiting for your reply. You are examing the lamp. Obsessed with determining why there's no light.

This is it. The seeds I spit after chewing the melon. There was yeast in his grin as he sniffed. Wine in every conversation. A poker face in every word.

The are souvenirs. Prizes to win. From burst balloons. Yawning plastic mouths. Laughing as we kill them.

I don't want tomorrow. Don't want tonight. The wilted leaves of circumstance prying forget me's loose . Stale petticoats blossoming through unworn dresses. Effortlessly we time the decision to prove we're right.

Drowning in his Mick Jagger smiles I wondered if he knew at all how lonely he was.

If he'd ever know all that he'd lost.

They talk of dark matter. Like there are invisible demons devouring the universe. They hypothesize about the smaller pieces of the smallest things. There's always something smaller the bigger that your microscope is.

There's only so much I can remember. And then I start to imagine my past was different. Just for the sake of having something to think about when the thinking about is all that's left.

He had more ego than charisma. But who doesn't? I'd be satirizing my love for him as we fucked. Everything he did made me hate myself. And that is the best kind of lover.

When my head collided with the ceiling fan and I didn't even notice at first I knew we were having fun. When he picked me up on his shoulders and spun me around by the edge of the water I was sure he'd drop me. He didn't.

For those few seconds I didn't weigh anything at all. Gravity didn't even exist.

The first time we really touched he pulled me into his arms. Made me fall so he could catch me. I didn't think at all. Just fell neatly into the cocoon of him and let the change occur.

Altered instantly from a girl who'd never known to a woman who always would.

There's a word for what we were. If I only knew it. The dirty linens error makes of our trials. The satin sleeping bags we wrap the fondness in. Little black bags to doctor how long ago it mattered.

I'm only happy when I'm not myself. There was never anything to come between us except who I was.

We never ate a meal together. Never did anything other than fuck. Heads under the covers. Tongues on repeat. It was as if life was just a distraction.

And all the world was wrong except for us.

There are plenty of words for what we were. But I don't want to use them. Not again.

There's a strategy to touch. It's not there only to be our pleasure. When you're a woman its a means to what you really want. Don't start on about equality. Both genders have casual sex. But only a woman can engage in casual sex with the same partner for years and still believe it will lead to intimacy.

You have your way. I have mine. Same goal. Different paths.

Sad part is, it's either something right away or else it never will be.

It's one thing to get your heart broken. It's quite another to hand them the hammer.

She held the doorbell between her lips. Like a cigarette still burning. She snuck into it. Like underwear. The pretense. The accusation. That she might be there. A filter wringing through her thoughts. In the clenched fists of desperate lovers. Partial friends. The cliches of older men.

The doorbells. The first in a series of lies she's thankful she told.

The doorbell everywhere. Between her legs. In the remnants of her nail polish. In the shadows of their pants. As the sound drew its sketches. Preparing for the final portrait. Mocking the digestion as the bed tried to swallow them. And failed.

The doorbell. The furtive chime of answers to questions no one asked.

The doorbell. Always asking.

Who's there?

The daffodil was talking with the lion. Under a putty sky that the daffodil thought looked like an abortion. A chaffed womb. A vacuumed fetus. But the lion insisted it more resembled addiction. In all the ways it was always us. In the tits our mothers fed us with. In the diapers that caught our feces. In every instance of naked. The humble sparrow. The coquettish wren. Barely flexing the muscles of the tree. As patiently they watch. The leaves returning.

The winter applying its mascara. Lids fluttering furiously amongst the black. Not to see better, but to be better seen. By whatever deity counts the feathers on these useless wings.

The daffodil and the lion didn't mind the way their conversation lulled into madness. She expected it. The lion did. Knowing the kill so well.

Saying the words out loud they are different. Broken dishes in every good night. Wearing the cape in split infinitives. At the auction where we meet again. Five or ten years later. I'm still bidding on adverbs I have no intention of purchasing. He's still a sentence strangled by a semi-colon. And we're still writing each other one drug at a time.

Even if it's crazy I don't care. I can't name the places, but I can picture them. The spasms of busy train tracks parcelling strangers into our lives. Little holidays for the heart celebrate their empty boxes and torn wrapping paper.

Saying the words out loud was not the hardest thing I've ever had to do. It was the waiting. To hear them said back.

It's easy to be smart. When you've spent so many years being stupid. It's easy to say the words. When you know you'll never hear them.

The glass exhales and you tell yourself you're done. But you only wish it were true.

The perfume of fantasy so opaque in my nostrils. As I try to breathe. Like shots of jack daniels for the soul.

Unbuckling the drama with nervous hands. She threw her message into the sea beside her. The thoughtless chomp of repetition solving all mysteries with a tongue. In lust's rented tuxedos they stumbled to follow the rhythm. Of so many lovers before them.

The parrot on her shoulder always squawking the same old phrase she taught it so long ago. No One knows. It made so much sense then. To hear it spat back in her face. How ridiculous it all was.

The pointed heels of decision clicking loudly as they pace. Up and down her hall. The long corridors that lead us to each other. The screen door in the wind. Banging out our SOS. The waiting to be saved. That's the worst part.

Tomorrow close enough to touch.

I thought I knew what it means to be alone. Pale as a juror in my verdict. About to find me guilty.

There are reasons. And there are excuses. The only difference being how many drinks I've had.

It's always raining.


There's no end to the learning.

Tornadoes dressed as angels. In the politics of love we flounder. One touch a rider on the next bill. If I was your lover so be it. If I loved you so what. Purple bruises turning blue. on flaccid skin. The warm blanket of seduction turning raisins into grapes again.

There's a stockholm syndrome in every instance of affection. The varnish of time turning broken hearts into friends. As if those pawns were enough to mate. Purchase that victory from the wolves.

In little rages. In borrowed friends. I named them One by one. Until I could hear myself crying. Negotiating with the distance between now and then. Trying to explain to it why the world was gone.

It's the afterwards I always worry about. Not whether we'll remember. But will we want to.

Throwing ourselves into that kiln. Nervously anticipating the shapes we'll end up being.

It's not my art. It's just my life. But sometimes I can't tell the difference. Pulling the paper closer to my pencil. I'm not sure if I've forgotten how to draw or refuse to remember.

I wasn't wrong. It was a question not an answer. Giving lap dances to tomorrow to see how well it would tip. I profited. What I lost in dignity I gained in cynicism. I prefer to think it was mutual.

There are stores where the prices is the price. The cornerstone of reality. No negotiating. Just tags on everything. An amount that must be sacrificed to leave with more than you came in with.

And the there are others. Where the price magically goes down if you're only brave enough to ask. Everything is cheaper the less that you want it. Pull down their underwear. Map the dimples above their asses. There are jackals in every moment of pleasure. Looking for the weakest. Everything you feel someone else's dinner.

Sometimes I'm big. The moment so small I feel like a giant. Because they gave that to me. In heroin stares. In cocaine sex. And I am content to be their drug. For however long the high is generous. The coming down only a factor in an equation I could never hope to solve.

Sometimes I'm so big. And they're so small. Those moments, the mumbles of vinyl as it spins without the aid of the amplifier. The faintest whisper of something so much larger. Convincing me I'm high enough to see everything.

Whatever drug we are. Or were to each other. It's the sober of us I remember when I'm small.

Turning over the pedsetal. The liquid staining like blood. Sucking on the tailpipe of the darkness. Licking every dent of lipstick from its ugly grin. Biting down on the reds. Desire overwhelming. And the blues. Reality staunch on its soapbox. With fouled teeth. Running. With scissors in hand. Through outlines more edge than center.

Deciding. The lisp of the bed huddled in intimate campaigns. Both for and against us. Maybe I was always this lonely. Or it just seems that way since.

Trudging through the sewers of touch. Planting our roses in oceans of shit. Maybe it's not so crazy.

Scoop out the feuts. Carve the face. Put a candle inside to light up that pumpkin. It's always Halloween when I'm in love. Even completely naked, I'm still in costume.

And that is how I know they are too.

He pulled his penis out of her body. Leaving the hole slightly larger than it was before he had stuck her. He pulled it out. A needle still fat on the drug. Tripping over her sober skin as she explained addiction in run-on sentences.

Lucid jabs of delirium condescending her understanding. Person by person. Touch by touch. In limpid arguments with dirty eyeglasses. She pretends to see. what she never has. The perfect convex of batting eyelashes pushes flesh aside. It's better to be nearsighted. Better not see. How far it is.

The passive carnivore that wets her bed. Like sizing on an empty canvas.

You were absurd. The choke of hesitation dooming every word. You were impossible. A tournament of maybes posturing. Lifetimes gone in a second's pause.

I'm not recovering.

In kindergarten when you ate the paste it wasn't because it tasted good. It was because it was forbidden. Every night is kindergarten. Every person paste. I'm not catholic, but you'd think I was. With the guilt and regret. And inappropriate pigtails. My grandmother was. Catholic. When she was a child. Not really anything as an adult. Siren perhaps. Incubus. Lioness in heat forgetting her cubs.

That is the evolution of survival. That surviving depends upon amnesia. The innate tendency to discontinue loving anything, anyone that is gone. That is life. That is its sour seed that grows deep inside each of us.

In first grade when you told the boy. You didn't do it to hear him say he liked you too. You did it because you knew it was hopeless. Every day is first grade. Every person is him.

This is the frailty of life. A paradox of loyalties that invariably cease the moment we can't use them anymore. This is the truth of happiness. A swarm of bees attacking as we catch the bits of nectar that drop.

There the future was writ in forbidden paste on kindergarten lips. Our paradises lost before we ever knew we had them.

A drop of honey on stung, stung skin. Edens drawn in red sheets with fingers that still smell of kindergarten.

sleeping on the floor. sewn together in careless stitches. stabbed by the thread. little blizzards in tiny pants. ring the bell.

we said. some times. and never. we said nothing so many times i understood.

walls like skyscrapers. as tall as alone is when i'm not. the paper a razor at my wrists. the pen. making sense of the blood. the rainbow of dying fraught with so many colors i never knew where there. the thoughts. the droppings of rats. a map to where it doesn't matter. and never has.

flat pajamas laid out on a missing bed. the last words of a book leaving me with nothing to do except wish that I had read slower.

or had stopped before I reached the end.

All alone with people I don't know yet. Tassels of light sewn to darkness. In the shape of smell. three-dimensional memories. In the shadow of touch. Billowing nightgowns of skin dancing on the exhale of every wish.

Quiet pillows. Snoring softly against our breath. The chalk outlines of lives we don't remember. Or never knew. In the fariy tales we wrtoe to ourselves when no one was listening. In the methods I chose. The key to heaven stuck in the lock to hell. The hush of strangers in our beds. The meriful opiates with which time stabs at us. As we wake up. Drowning in the smell of stranger. Already forgetting how it felt.

To be that close.

All my fingers are balloons about to pop. The tense of helium in erect breasts. Oh my eyes, they're just dead stones sewn into the quilt of my frown. Mute infants in their cribs while mommy opens the valve on her arm.

Some nights I'm so tired I seriously wonder if I'm dead. Or dying. Wish it true under my breath. And there's no reason. Nothing that I've done to make it so. Sleep. Eat. Work. Drink. Write. Repeat. Until one of those tunnels finally caves in. There are the bricks. Rough moments of epiphany that tremble still to the tumble of broken men. The clause of self moaning. Sobbing. Fallen fruit. Rotting to be picked. There is mortar. Fragments of truth still embedded. In futures I hope I'll never know. Paring knives cutting bread.

The only question is will I ever put them together.

I know we all want to believe the ones we love are getting better. But the ones we love. They only want to be certain we don't know they're not.

I'm so tired sometimes without a reason. Like a cartoon character who looks down to discover that the ground is gone. And only then does he fall.

She chewed on a loose piece of skin near the last knuckle on her first finger. Gnawing through the dead cells. The collagen within stretching like caramel from her hand to the stones behind her lips. Washing it down with a stiff shot of telephone hopscotch. Throwing her thoughts over the buttons. Jumping from one to next. Spilling through memories via the digits assigned to them.

It had only been a few years. She hadn't forgotten, but she couldn't remember.

Little hiccups she used to hear in the way they'd speak to her. The giggles in their hands as they'd begin to touch her. The faint applause in their eyes when they'd stare. The many footnotes of many lovers. All gone or faded so much that they might never have been.

She puts on her questions one leg at a time. Perched on the edge of her small world. Drawing in colors she hasn't named yet pictures she hopes she'll never recognize. She hems her life with needle and thread. Like any one would. Sloppy stitches to adjust the distance between herself and her fall. An encyclopedia of all the persons she had been.

Herself now a mortgage. A debt she owes to each of them.

I've always entertained suicide as one would any guest. With friendly offers of liquor and mints. And a promise of a place to stay the night should it exceed its own limits. I've always considered suicide the only real god. The one that actually listens when it hurts. The voice that answers with silence our most desperate of questions.

I've always wanted to be that sick. That lost. To think nothing of the consequence.

I've always wondered what drug there is to live for that I haven't tried. How it differs from the ones I've tested. Joy. Some broken calendar obese with years I've yet to live. How can they be happy. What makes it so? There's just the world. And us drowning in the rage of it. There's just the world. And us. Prone to gods that don't know. How lonely eden is.

There will be these conversations with the night light. To the tempo of glass limping up crippled stairs. One excuse tumbling into the next in a bulimia of rationale. Binging and purging the sickness into salvation.

There's the sweat of black ink caught under bitten nails. And white paper drowning in what I thought I could draw. Wormholes in subconscious spitting me out into worlds unknown.

There's the girl. The plastic Pinocchio braiding her strings. Ever the martyr. Seducing her villains.

There's the boy swinging with his eyes shut tight. Half way to home base before he's even touched the ball.

There's life. The rule of habeus corpus. No murder until a body is found. There are the lawyers, the moments that try to prove. And there are the judges. On the tip of my tongue.

There was the crime. But it doesn't belong to us anymore.

There was a verdict. In every lover.

The hatter was mad enough. So I dicarded the wrench in my chest and let the rupture be what it was. Just a slanted square in a big game board. The callouses of checkmate showing not on the king, but his many pawns.

The rook. So lateral. The bishop. so helpful. As the diagram constructs our passage to the end of the world.

Taking the words in time-release doses. These feeble medicines I prescribe myself. Not to cure. Not even to quell. Only to make it worse. Break the bone in another place under the cover of casts thick with alone.

I know they can't save me. Though I imagine the ways they could. I know the needle is dull. As it scars over the songs. A broken elevator vomitting between floors. Doors half open. The people inside eyelashes stuck to its cheeks. Tears without a witness.

The hatter is mad enough. The alice quite small. Negotiating with the pills thtat make her bigger she confesses that she'd rather be small.

When I get depressed I play solitaire. I like how chanced every loss and every win is. Each outcome decided before I've even begun. There's comfort to be found in such a situation when at the mercy of fickle hormones and pregnant synapses.

I sing with the songs. Flatly echoing their cants in my broken breaths. Scouring my memories of sex for something I can use to get off on now. But they're all still pictures. The sound gone. The movement forfeited. To the czars of survival. How? How if we can always learn to live out them could we have needed.

How could it have ever been love if time can just take it all away from us.

Grwoing old one playlist at a time. Wanting to remember the pain. So alone now that i've only myself to blame.

In the overboard. In the mania. Like little honey bees stinging and tearing away from their own abdomens just to hurt us. To die like we did. When time was foul and pungent. Menstruating between us. In echoing heartbeats.

The cold. The icebergs belting between my lips. In broken overalls. In fallen socks. The ambient dovetails of seduction like locks coming undone. We couldn't see each other but it was clear.

Just where the wizard was.

All those curtains. Struggling with our names.

Every orphan. A demon as impotent as she is.

There was a pen in her left hand. A cigarette in her right. The fickle restraints of happenstance. Cyanide capsules punctuating every sentence from the her first word to what she imagined would be her last. In corsetted daydreams she gives blow jobs to death. A lie so determined. It's almost true.

The little monsters circumstance will breed. From inside the wounds of our savior. Tomorrow is not at fault.

Certain lies can save us. The prolific dogma of lovers tearing our heavnes from empty pages. Those clowns in their frightening makeup. Smiles drawn in. Tears painted. Rushed liaisons with yesterday.

All those hours pregnant with us.

Stillborn.

Some things happen in cycles. But occasionally it's just the difference between saying I'm bleeding or I'm not. Pissing in hot buckets. Exploring the stench. Until someone asks me, quite arbitrarily, where all my eyelashes have gone. And the only answer I have is away. Sober butterflies of the cocoons you remember.

Cupping his head to nullify the bloat. His lies sprinting through their asthma to catch up with us.

And grabbing the cigarette from between my lips he took his first breath of my life. Urgent fingers of cancer flowing through the locks in his chest. All the keys to living in admitting we were already dead.

The shape of his lips. An empty playground. A squeaking swing. Not understanding the silence. Convinced he'd gone deaf when it was his sight that had betrayed him.

There are lies and their are perceptions. The only difference being whom you ask. There are cycles. Canyons and crucifixes in flesh. To preach and then to die for our sins. Like playing poker with yourself. Never knowing which one of you will win. The scope of memory the only marker. The only jury in a trial where I'm always both.

Guilty.

and Innocent.

Of every moment.

There were always ways. Had always been. Would always be. Entrances to the mind that required neither injection nor relent. Building her crocus one pebble at a time. The shift of light favoring a slow pace. In slips of steps like shreds of paper left behind after the ink had run dry.

Promises of mountains not withstanding. Naming the deserts after herself. In stutters. Learning to walk. In tosses. A coin to let drop. The favors of gravity not forgotten.

There we were in our ragged jackets. In our tattered denims. Ready to live a life that was already gone.

There we stood and watched the white gloves waving. The funerals of love clutching their IV's. Like some path back to before we were killing each other.

The ransom of abject lovers sour only dividend.

She chatted with jesus on the elevator. He complimented her on her shoes. She congratulated him on his fabulousness and inquired as to whom his publicist was. Oh. He did not like that.

She put the words in the freezer and sat down at the kitchen table. Logging her waiting in arguments with word puzzles and handfuls of peanuts. The occasional sip of diet pepsi. She wasn't sure how long it took for liquid to become solid, but she suspected it was a slow process. Like everything is. From the moment she punches in the first letter. An infinite undress infront of a crowd of strangers as her costume slithers away. As hollow as when she wore it. As hollow as it wore her.

If there were pills. Yellow or blue ones, she thought. Wouldn't it still be the same waiting. For liquid to harden. Just then I'd never see the thaw again. Isn't it only natural, she insisted, that the disease would be the origin of the cure. I'm not a scientist, but I know the incest of nature and irony is what makes art. I'm no one's lover, but I know all anyone wants is hope. Tomorrow in little ration, nitrogen packages so we'll never go hungry again.

It doesn't matter how it tastes.

She shoved a marker in his face asked jesus to sign her breasts. And he said, he loved her, but not enough to die again.

It's dark enough. To see. The bottom of the moat. The paper dolls bleeding out their ink. Into the mouths of crocodiles. It's dark enough. To admit light is what we imagine it to be. The orange on the tip of my tongue as the pill tsunamied. Little worlds under giant microscopes appearing real. Perfect ant farms. Tunnelling through patterns of sand. Unaware of the darkness that is larger than their gods.

One voice at a time. The top of the castle. Cloyed in verses I could once understand. The indifferent metaphors of naked poets. Drunk on more than just alcohol. Content with failure.

It's dark enough. It's moons without a sun to light them. It's skin fermented sharp enough to bite us back. It's the hollow promise of every encounter. Like vinegar. Too sour to swallow.

It's dark enough without you. Why make it darker.

i. you don't.

love anything.

callous pigeons
carry the touch

from my skin
to yours.

and back
again.

connecting dots
in invisible ink.

determined sheets
collect the tears
of our flesh

in damp portraits
that draw our hearts
in red ink.

remnants of lust.
too content with
our loneliness.

our truth being
just how softly the
pillow meets our
heavy heads

as we sink into
the tomb we say
will be tomorrow.

Scribbling patches in the soil with a gnarled twig. She bent down to eyeball the tollbooth in the glass. Maverick indiscretions still in their tanning beds. Random. Phone numbers in chipped fingerprints. Window panes breathing too deep. Exhaling so hard. Only the broken wrists of caulk remember what they saw.

One match left in the book. One stain still pickling her skin. In sour braids. Like the weight of tarnish intensified by soap and water.

No one to blame.

The sheets folded into a dark fortune cookie. We the slip of paper. The door our audience. As those gunshots laughed up from our groins. Staining her lips with his gelid gunpowder. Mixing with raindrops of rouge left over from before. She'd been told about the glass slipper. But only for princes and orphans.

We'd read the stories. And written some. In the stale sulfur our tongues had kept. Of devils meaning too well. During arguments with the glass.

Wandering in dreams too vivid. Infected by every splinter. All our spears sunken into the whale. All of our coffins close enough to dissect. The cutting boards of saviors in despair.

A dry heave. A champagne glass of broken windows. Spilling over.

She woke up. Her bed a coffin. Each nightmare an autopsy. She slept. Every night as dead as anyone had ever slept. Beside what some would call angels. Others demons. All the life that has parcelled us to our current location. A series of falls that when you look back you see yourself running. Not because you did, but because it wouldn't make any sense otherwise. To fall so many times and still be standing. Scouring each stray thought for a long lost face. Someone on a bus. Or the platform as you boarded a train that never brought you back.

The dull needle of experience still tumbling over the veins. Examining each swatch of skin for a path between the scars. To enter. To release. All those echoes others call demons and angels. Just thoughts beating their wings against her coffin. Her nightmares debating when she'll wake up.

Tiny scales still trying to weigh boulders.

She sat down at her desk. A bag of microwave popcorn suddenly gone flat. Telling her story in moments of silence. The scrape of her bedroom slippers charging the carpet as he walked. In mute cyclones. High heeled whispers sobering from toe to throat. Picking all the fruit already fallen. Empty gloves corrupted by the flecks of skin holed up inside it. Flat skeletons with color as their only mask. Dark outlines. Grey paper. Like their eyes are when it's over. Circumstance her infallible savior.

Every word. Every touch. Inadmissible evidence.

Only a daughter and a son left. To testify that she had once lived.

Loathe in the conversion of Fahrenheit to Celsius. Rows of miniature soldiers sharing their plastic match.

Her life the anecdote. Her eyes at the edge of her nose. Caterpillars dead in their cocoons. Half-way through metamorphosis.

Truth like a puddle teasing a child to dirty itself. Not the first time.

He reads the words like a jigsaw puzzle. Pieces of the girl to assemble. Cure that broken image of itself.

In a kaleidoscope of grunts each folding into the next. We got stoned on each other. So many times until sober was a novelty again.

He used to give me books. The pocket-sized kind that sell optimism from spinning wire racks right next to the prefab reading glasses. The ones where every page is an upside down frown, but hardly a smile. A compendium of the little lies we tells ourselves every day just to get to the next one. I don't know, but I think he wanted to save me to prove to himself that anything could be salvaged.

I look at him there. All those moments of ours sunken into digestion. Experiences as tangible as food. Moving through us. From mouth to stomach to intestine. The slow process of consumption turning every love into shit.

He's still there fidgeting with those crumbs. The empty plate wailing as he grabs at the leftovers with a rigid fork. He Brailles my heart in bits and pieces. Desperate to know what my blind is.

I don't know, but I think it's hard doing the saving. Much harder than being saved.

I don't know, but I think it was easier being broken.

There was a doll that would cry when I turned it over. A plastic harpoon of sounds wedged up its puffy, pink ass. Prerecorded tears splintering out its rear like so many blades of dead grass.

There were many dolls. I'd dress them and cut their hair with scissors bigger than my head. The molded plastic of their handles chaffing my thumb as I held them in the wrong hand. I was their parent and teacher. Their god and their devil. While the batteries conspired to silence the tears of the only doll I've ever understood.

Her white dress with eyelets at the neck and hem. Her pink smile stalled in a moment of happiness. Her zippered pink ass giving away our secret.

The perfect arithmetic of submission. Adding us up. And dividing by the remainder.

When you design websites it's almost as though you're purposely creating shit art. To manipulate people and machines. Not that different from regular life. Insomniac checkerboards fuss with the pieces until every corner is a blur. I don't know that much about checkmate, but the impasse is all too familiar.

If I could lie down in the middle of the street and just have all the cars and trucks glide over me. Onion paper world to my unsharpened pencil. Mutely tracing anything willing to show through. Imagining myself a passenger in each of those vehicles. Where would they be going?

To the edge of the cliff to contemplate the nothing that may come after this. To the long pauses between the floats as the parade sours into circumstance. To the bottles full of dead genies. Fat with wishes that were used up long ago.

I'm looking for them. With a plastic shovel and bucket for my telescope. Treating the dirt like punctuation. Using it to make sense of so many words. I look for them. Through spotty glasses where the loose skin collects during blizzards of the self. When footprints are the only map. How you were lost the key to being found.

His response already infected with my silence. An alarm I can't turn off.

I'm coughing. Trying to swallow the phlegm that's formed a spider web in my throat. But it's still there collecting victims. I'm anticipating the sickness. Knowing the disease is the key to the cure.