In the stubborn genetics of humanity we are all survivors. The discoveries. Fears and triumphs of neaderthal still seasoning our blood. On brass heartbeats life rises from the tarnish. Over sidewalks erupting with the roots of trees I wander the volcano wondering if any of our power is real. Are we evoultion? Or just the dinosaurs of today?

I'm usually more about personal moments. The one drone dissatisfied with the hive. The single word drowning in the vastness of the page. Trying to rescue it. Ballet slippers on every encounter. Nutcracker Suites beseeching idle Beethovens.

There will always be circumstances. Bottles much too easily. Too often opened. As humbled of our weakness as we are empowered by it. I was dead, but still I live. I've been broken so many times, but still I have all my pieces. I was born a child, but somehow became an adult. I am lost from everyone.

Except myself.

And that is all I need to know.

She wore the gap upon her brow. A quiet cough under her breath. The stillness. The threat. Of sad eyes smiling upon her skin. Leeches growing fat on the illness in her blood.

The parachute of touch not opening. The jump from a plane that didn't crash. The limp of solitude on broken crutches. The viocdin the darkness prescribes convincing found skin it's gone. Panic in proper doses minimizes the loss.

She counted the bricks between the windows. As the building stuttered down to her through the fractured rays of sun. With a needle hanging from its arm. With cracked sunglasses on its forehead. She imagined what might be behind the glass. But held her breath. Until it was dark enough that she couldn't tell.

We're not ugly. We're not beautiful. We're the blow jobs our mothers couldn't spit out. Tucked in the way of tomorrow. Dead as a speed bump under a flat tire.

There were no children in their future. Nor consolidation of trusts. Just a series of emotional enimas to pay off the mortgage on their hearts.

The world a box of crayons. 64 colors of men to test against the so many blank pages. I'd always imagined myself drawing the outlines, but never being the one to fill them in. I'd always treated sex as a tool. A way to repair what is broken.

I wish I knew what he thought as we flirted with oblivion. The differential honesty of lies. Making strangers of sex. The calm of hopelessness arriving in doses of despair. In words not loud enough. To scream as I do in my head. In cliches as naive as love would ask of us.

I only know the paper. How long it waits to be born. In cramps of ink that menstruate as poets pretend to know what to write. I only know how it sounds when there's nothing left to want. All those people like candles going out.

Our pain is the yardstick we meausre all our happiness against.

The moment is deep and dark and frivolous. Bound to a nonexistent climax. A white dress gagged by the girth of her hole. The hole in all of us. The echo of dreams unfinished. The scrape of the thumb against the trigger. While targets taunt.

A heart is deep and dark and frivolous. A swollen charm clutching a broken neck. Some pale magic whose only wishes are of dying. A lie interrupted.

Dark and frivolous. Stern in its chaos. Secure in her long legs. Trivial in her helplessness. An antidote more dangerous than dying.

An excuse. An obituary. A woman. A man. Deciding. How hard it would be.

The kitten. Lost in its claws. The circumstance deciding for us. We're a work of fiction and an autobiography. We're words no one has said. We're asking when we should be demanding.

To be loved.

Tugging up on the collar of sleep. Counting the words we have left. A scream in her pocket. Looking for the zipper she doesn't know is there.

Change occurs in little cuts. The slow infection of seldom sex like rope on her wrists. Like razors under her thumb. Acquiescing every mystery to gain contract of touch. With lawyers in your kiss. Juries under your skin.


Nothing is over and everything is. The pale curtain combusts. Of monologues not fitting. Costumes that wouldn't disguise. The prison in the space us.

A hushed balloon on the edge of pop. A serene driveway forfeits the exit.

Reconciling the science of lovers. And the chaos of sex. Loving the skin and hating it. For all the people it hides from me. For all myself it reveals to them.

The fantasy of truth making dark corners light. On the brink of extinction life awakens from the grave between my thighs. The science fiction of hope telling me lies.

Dead tears still blink like the warm dew between her thighs. Where her dress cuts her in half. Separating the doll from the clothes. In a throw of sighs. In the skip of words across a river of skin.

Thrown.

Into a potluck of manias. Bribed by the bridge to destroy it. Children of children. Thick outlines of lovers to color in. With our lost crayons. Grey pages drowned in the before. The after of having lived.

Treaties with devil. A calm roulette. Pasting those flower petal back onto their stems.

There are ways to measure. The distance, but not the depth.

The smoke chases the walls in fervent lisps. A stray lover scratching on her backsteps. Fattened by the sun at one moment. Bitten in half by the dark the next. Trump always goes to the coquette. No matter the hand you're holding.

The dewy tirades of convenient sex leave behind too many witnesses for any jury to overlook. There's no actual crime. But the memory is more than conviction enough.

We'd slump in the bed with jaundiced remorse. Rag dolls straining every stitch. Arguing with every the thread. As each one let a little more of what was inside out. We'd squirm in our plastic shoes. Tugging against every repair.

begging mutely to deafened gods. do nothing for me now. it's all i've ever wanted.

Thank you to whomever is the proprietor of The Differance Engine for their thoughtful post about some of my writings.

I cut away the long strands. Lighten my head. Searching the music for cues. Tracing the the memories for hints as to what's next. The spaces on the floor that weren't there until. The treasures we'd yet to bury. Now I can't remember where we left them.

Stripping away the skin. The fruit revealing the seeds of the person yet to break the surface. All we are is someone else's garden. Flowers to pick. Petals to be spent. Torn open like envelopes. Inside not what they expected.

In conversations with my future self I'd argue that she'd been to reticent. You can only be a child so long before you're devoured by your innocence. So grow up already. Admit. You chose those situations. Selected each individual to make it hurt all the better.

And I wanted to want. Things I could not have. Because there is nothing so seductive as what can't be had. No drug so potent as the forbidden.

Lacing up the boots of the hurricane. Pulling on the thick socks of the storm. I remember thinking I've been as close as I need to get. Alone like this is more than enough. That any closer would only prove us wrong.

We keep track of the castles. A desperate clock. We measure the folds in the sand. An anxious tide pushes us closer and further apart. There's a world under our feet and a world above us. A heaven and a hell simmering in each decision. A roulette in every lover. A bet. A hope. A trust. That our honesty won't betray us.

He talks in numbers. So that all I can do is add them up. He talks like the world was created just for us. So that all I can do is wait for him to stop.

I run my finger down the glass. Drawing my name in the perspiration. I tell him tomrrow I'll see him again. Cure us both of that transition. From victim to artist. Knowing the words have already begun to dismantle those rooms. Leaving only orphaned staircases. No way for us to return. Nothing left of us except blank pages for the shadows to color in.

I doctor the changes. As any addict would. Wrenching each story from its cumbersome truths. In earthquakes of submission. In suicides of acceptance. I lie. Tell them I feel things I can't anymore. While dead roots break through the pavement. The snarl of stray dogs devouring their pity of a meal. The croak of irony as we bleed ourselves young again. The grin of the rifle as it points. Aims as it should. Bound to see as the bullet would. The throttle of skin in its last few moments to be alive.

A pendulum reciting the years wasted trying to be loved. A picture. A negative. Of someone so close. All I needed to prove. it couldn't happen.

Tick. Tell those staircases to relax.

Tock. The chance was prize enough.

We watched some tv like we always do. Abandoned swings still chirping. Of orbiting lives in giggles and kicks. There wasn't anything of interest on. So we talked more than usual. Voices like fat markers on cardboard. Thick with new questions in every response. Thoughts on the loosest margins. Words a weight on all our tongues. Each of us happy to be together and none of us glad to be alive.

The clock stopped keeping track a few minutes before nine. As that one hour stretched on into four. A constipated storm cloud over all of our heads. A dollhouse. Ripe with cradles to sleep plastic children. And master bedrooms for poseable spouses. A perfect miniature of a flawed subject. The reality of ourselves shrunk down small enough to shallow. No lie so harsh as the the people we market ourselves as being.

We're peering through the tiny windows. Seeing birthdays and weddings. Jobs and sex. Because they must be real, if we are. Smaller from where we look, but still the same as us. As size is relative. And plastic a part of every wardrobe.

I'm feeling for the keys in the dark. The place to begin. Plant my crutch and go from there. Like all cripples do. Lean against whatever is hardest. Or else try to land on something soft.

I built this demon. From the toes to anus. Bent over on the toilet. Angry bowels scribbling down the words. In fits of vomit. The perfect truth of every heart is that love is our greatest flaw.

I had your eyes with me when I finally decided to change. I stencilled the pocket on the back of your ass. The little lies make all the difference. Especially when you know you were wrong.

The little wings of birds you can't name. The frail medicines you say make it better. The people like fireflies on the horizon. So far away. You wonder how you ever knew them.

On the edge of the road. Narrow footsteps lead us away from and take us back home. Carrying the sun on our backs. Calculating the distance between ourselves and the cars speeding passed. Treatments in every face. Love. Sex. Friendship. Drugs of a different flavor. Drugs still the same.

On our way there. Empty pockets bleed into the slow footsteps of dreams I'd had the night before. Cardboard cutouts of happiness looming larger than the window I'd set aside for them. The grass. The weeds. Breaking under our step. In a calm requiem. A marching band stomping off into Auschwitz. Where rage is the the lamb to our lion.

On our way back. Pockets laden with cellphones. Eyes flat enough to match the landscape. The world full of pockets that are full of nothing. Stale matches that won't flame. Little footprints in the dirt. Small steps in big shoes. All of us pretending the microscope isn't lying.

The bulldog in his breath. One more night. That's all I ask. One more night to hold in the piss until every word is a crisis. One more night to tell the truth with a fire hose of lies. This corrupt encyclopedia of skin debating humanity.

There in the scrutiny of Fridays and Saturdays the timepiece stops. The final gasp of tomorrow had. A puddle in the rain burping out its listless sobs. With my tongue I measure my lips. Sick with kisses I can't name.

With my mind I weigh my head against the words. Pierced balloon at the back of my throat. Channeling the potent excess of so many years wondering what life is. The truth is rife with victims. When will I be one again?

The leash is long enough, but the collar's too tight.

It's more a syndrome. Stale apple pie wearing fresh cheddar underwear. Forks are highways. Driving a path through thick concrete beds. Spoons are continents. Roiling atop an inferno of chaoses. Hands are dinosaurs. Extinct to our hearts. Tongues are Darwin. Evolving our touch.

Until we are a franchise of ourselves.

I'd say he was lonely if I wasn't so busy wondering what that means. I'd roll in the stripes of the tiger if its roar still meant anything. I'd wear the ruffle on my ass. Dogeballs in mid-flight. I'd get fat. Pregnant with too many moments to name. I'd answer. And be sober. A crash cart of a friend. A parachute of a lover. In the plane wreck of their lives.

I'd give birth. Day in and day out. To everything I'm supposed to want. The clothes. The makeup. And the children. I'd do it all just to prove them wrong. That happiness is just a door that opens on a room that isn't there.

The cumulative abortion of just being alive gives birth to so much much. When you're willing to to be emptied out.

Hey. How ya doing? Long time no snark. You've gained some weight. Hmmm. So have I. It was a lie before we told it. A snowstorm in July. The sex was a plane crash. The love a lawsuit. The friendship an ambulance.

So how are you doing these days? Am fascinated by the cyberstalk. Knowing the past is the drug of choice for those the future has dicked. Are you lonely? Are you lost? It's like solving a cryptogram. Measuring the patterns in the lie against what once was true.

I wouldn't call me either. I wouldn't talk to myself at all. Had I that choice.

How old are you now? How hard does the world press down on those tired veins? It's a new mattress doused in sex for the first time. Steeped in the hiss of brewing skin. The aura is permanent.

You say nothing. I say even less the more that I write. We stare at our toes like scolded children and wait for something to happen to us.

While something still waits for us to find it.

Memory is a tattletale. A fishnet vase. Spilling water everywhere. Sex is an attorney. Sworn to defend the guilty. A snowflake in April devoured by the greening grass. You spend your whole life pretending you know yourself. And what you want. When all you're really doing is skipping rope. Counting how many times you don't trip. Don't fall.

The awkward trivialities of life skidding under your feet. A dull chisel chewing on a knot in the wood. Pimples popped. Diapers changed. Toilets flushing. In an aquarium of suspects. Each one promising tomorrow will be different.

Frantic dictators on the edge of their empire. French doors at the back of our lives. Revealing to the world out there how empty we are inside. The liar in me knows better. It's the child I don't trust.

She had a little iodine in her kiss. The seduction of disease not withstanding. I wish I knew how it feels to be that kind of woman. The altar and the sacrifice. The sin and the penance. Like a god without a religion. Like a house without a roof. Let it rain. Let it float. Let our martyrs drown and our saviors swim.

He had a little bandage on his knee when I met him. Like he was prepared to stumble. Be wrong to find the right again. Believing in such an instance. That the truth could be painted on a flag. Or buried in a dented mattress. For women to find after their suitors had gone. The practical nursery rhymes of sex chewing on stale pillows. As if hunger has such an easy cure.

Clawing our way out of that nightmare. Still half asleep and wishing the alarm could reason. Writing our way through those daydreams. Needles eager to pierce the vein. Drawing heaven form traces of hell. Lost in the formality of seduction. Paper dolls bartering with the scissors. Blades of grass underfoot. Arguing over who drew first blood.

Lonely as I want to be. Sinking in the choreographed suicide of so many lovers.

Not lost. Not found.

Just as it should be. When you've gotten too close.

You could try the lamb. Knock. See if she's there. You could call the wolf. Leave a message. See if he calls back. Tiny dimples in a continent of insecurities. I wait to come undone. But life. It's such a slow surgery. I do everything to make it happen faster. But the truth is you can't kill yourself like this. Don't believe the public service messages.

I can drag the robe across the stage. The actor still inside it. But it leaves no trail. No sweat. As that spotlight carves its shape into the performance.

I was only spending my time learning what I could love. If it possessed the grace to return the favor. I was only trying on capes. That promised to make us into super heroes. Realizing none of them could.

It was more pencil than it was ink. Finally finding the words. I was more drunk than sober. The first time we fell in love.

But the fairy tale is still real.

It tastes just how it sounds. The gurgle of men pitted like grapes. It looks just how it should. So sweet it makes you gag. And then one day you're old enough. And you don't care. Can't remember. How it felt. Straddling the bed so long. Until your thighs ached with the void they left between them.

I'm never drunk anymore. Because there's no fun in it anymore. I only cut the dolls from the paper. And wonder what happens to the leftovers. I only just tell them how right it feels even though it's not. Because I prefer feeling lonely to feeling nothing at all.

I watch the movies. I keep track of the years. He writes. He thinks in chalk. Only to breathe it all away. I don't wonder what I lacked. Because I already know.

It's just as I imagined it. Drones stinging at the concrete. Honey bees loosing their abdomens. In the pull away. The entry point an unfortunate exit. Secure in the purpose of sex. To demean. It's apostles. The light not forgetting. With chisel and hammer. Gouging out a metaphor that's more tyrant than martyr. The anorexia of expression failing us again. Hunger a pale incentive to convince us to eat. Not understanding how something so soft got so hard. His search finally finds me sober.

Changed. But no different.

Our moments only remissions in my disease.

He pretends to light a cigarette. His words the only thing between his lips. He mimics being addicted. His life the only thing he can't control. He has pawns. He has bishops and rooks. He has everything he needs except a reason to win.

We wait. Quietly drawing on the side of the mountain. Little dolls with tiny feet walk out loud. Stepping in all the footprints of those come before them. Eyes like carbon. Bleed the ink through to the rest of our organs.

We laugh. In discordant gasps. Splitting atoms. Travelling time bed by bed. Until we are sure there is nothing left for us become. Flowers picked clean of every petal in a bulimia of questions.

He pretends we knew each other. Intimated with the various yawns of our looser skins. His loneliness my only betrayal. As darkness considers what's left. Of the pale orphans life has culled from our weaknesses.

He pretends he knows what I look like sober. A disfigured, despotic euphoria of a woman. He pretends. That when the lights are out. She's the one who makes love to him.

Face first down the mountain. Every shadow counting how far we've fallen. A vein in every arm of the river. Each pebble a bit of drug. Too far from hell. Too close to heaven. As life often is.

Sewn to the purple sky as it prepares to rain again. In careless stitches. Garments that only make us more naked. When the moon has its cap atop its bald, bald head. And all the stars coo from empty cradles. Then we are born. Desperate buoys in endless oceans. Calmly marking the divide between recreation and dying.

Little gods in short skirts slinging their sagging tits. Biased scales. Weigh the remains of our happiness. In manpower.

As the lights go out again.

Waking up from those ugly dreams. Pungent echoes of reality stomp their way inside the beauty of delirium. The cake is cut. With a dull knife. The icing licked. From filthy fingers.

We are sleeping. We are awake. Arthritic lovers chase the poison of the skin. In paint by numbers sex. Lonely poets wield their vices like weapons. Forgotten men imagine themselves remembered. In syllables like stiffened gauze. In punctuation like the stabs of orgasm. All our emptiness counting toward its detonation.

Falling asleep to these beautiful sorrows. Depression's sultry tango refusing to break the hold. When the words run out the people are all I have. Perfect strangers. Foiled kings on an empty chessboard.

The zippers on their lives waiting for for someone to notice that they're broken.

Waking up to those beautiful people. In those ugly situations. Sandpaper to satin. It's easy to love them. Knowing it's over.

Titles are easy. It's the story that's hard.

Aur Revoir. Stucco demons. Auf Wiedersehen. Brick angels.

Every stone. Knows me too well. Dotting the J's with smudged fingersprints. Crossing the T's. Like empty parking lots in the winter. The snow taller than us. The salt chewing through the soles of our shoes. Until every footprint is invisible. A manic alarm for every night the world remains mute. A coin toss to determine how hard it is.

The pandemonium of hope like fireworks. Exploding.

Falling down.

You cup your last eyelash in your hand and ponder how long it's been since you've lost.

She always wore her sweaters close to her neck. The beauty of the buttons was in how easily they came undone. Husks of shrimp down upon so many plates at the local red lobster. The fresh dead. The funerals without a name. Bowls of party chips undisturbed. The salt on their fingers unforgiving of the thrist imposed. The dark posters of profantiy hung on emtpy walls. Crucifixes for failed saviors.


Give me then. Failing puddles arguing with the sun. The coy semantics of happiness skipping rope to the tune of my restlessness. In rhymes unremarkable. With denim fists. Punching out a new obessesion.

A little blush with her whisper. The perils of happiness at every station. A hint of candy cane in her grief. Sugar crutches propping up diabetic hearts. Together we dance. To the pulse of dead batteries. Dolls undressed. Left naked in the shadows of our children.

We are. Nightmare solved with insanity. We are. a series of characters. That possess so many different meanings depending on the language.

A little past eleven she kicked over the glass. Jump-starting a futile debate. Between weakness and strength. Because anyone who's ever been broken knows they are the same.

"My cost, the price of a broken doll, can you
Remember that place
The place you would go to take pain away" - mudvayne

"My lamb and martyr, you look so precious.
Won't you come a bit closer,
close enough so I can smell you.
I need you to feel this,
I can't stand to burn too long.
Release inside of me.
For one sweet moment I am whole." - tool

I really get off on molestation songs.

You chew the branch from my thorn. In small bites the meat is bitten. Away from the bone. The skin undone like cold cellophane. Turning hard candy soft.

The mark of spoiled gods climax our story. In short breaths heavy with angels that never came back. The saltwater of dire kisses on freshly mowed skin. Weeds and all in the purchase of backward utopias I can't remember. Can't forget.

Broken knives drawing on the bones. In inks not meant to be seen.

My life in strobe lights. My life in envelopes missing a return address.

They make words with their mouths. I make mine with my hands. Different ways of telling the same story. All heads swivelling to follow this infinite tennis match. Of living. And dying being batted back and forth until we're too tired to try.

They listen with what they've said. Their own words their ears. Searching for a long lost twin. They count your change out in untold nightmares. Candy-coated miseries of prozac bills and married sex. Flaunting their autopsies in chatter about the weather. They talk to their lives in hushed whispers like a child nursing an imaginary friend.

You're lost when you don't know where you are. You're found when you don't know where you're going.

What's the definition of torque? I am. Filthy draperies of flesh hiding the fingerprints they've left on the window. I'm not drunk. I'm an architect. Begging the stairs to listen. I'm not alone. I'm a mother looking for the children she never had. The husbands she never married.

A house built on a cul de sac. A confession written backwards. From the last caress to the first. The shotgun choking on the bullet. The runt of the litter starved of its mother's milk.

Meant to die, but unlucky enough to have lived. Blister on the foot of life. Waiting to be broken.

I'm not a writer. Malignant gobstoppers in the swallow of my type. I'm not a poet. Frail legs straddling the fatted cock of suicide.

I'm a virgin. I'm a slut. I'm everything. I'm nothing.

I know you would give me back if you could.

If software could wonder. Be curious. It probably would be now. About the jests of malaise that leak from my fingers. In a chlorine swimming pool of depression who's farce is only exceeded by its logic. I was too old for this back when I was nineteen and clumsily tried to slit my wrists sober.

On that walk home I wondered who would see the room next. The bathtub dotted with my incompetance. My most wholesome of failures drying like a Jackson Pollock on the rose colored porcelain. On my way back through those much too safe streets I wondered how long I could wear long sleeves without arousing suspicion. Or at the very least being called on it. Turned out right up to this day no one ever asked. Why I tried. Why I let myself fail again.

You can paint the black windows white and tell yourself you can see the sun. But you'll still be cold. And outside it'll still be night.

Those veins that look so near are protected by bone and tendon. Those veins that hiss your only truth in hot neon. The closer they seem the further away they are.

Waiting for the floor to decide. Which footprints it would keep. Watching the glass turn opaque. The failed metaphors of friends looking for lovers. And alcoholics searching for the poet they used to be.

Waking up to die all over again. The arrant marathons of insomniacs. Our blisters all that's left of our pride. As we crawl. The fever just enough to keep us alive.

Turning it over to the scarecrow. The grim smile amongst all those weeds. The condom on my happiness. Drowning in people I'll never know.

It's not like I want to be the burden, but I can see myself loving it. The hierarchy of sex converted to decimal points. Like we were there when the world began. Asking all these thing of us. Like we had some role in the concept of love.

You'll say it's easy being us. And maybe you're right.

You'll say I'm only as happy as I want to be. And maybe you'd be right. Were anyone else.

The duchess cleaned the fish while the knight melted the butter. Hail to the king they hummed under their breath. Insights made of wax fucked by the flame. It's only numb because I say it is.

The bloodhound passing out the cortisone to the children in the chimney. Confessions in soot wear the bricks. In sizes too small.

The bartender pukes his way through the lap dance of listening. Emptying out their skins. The tumblers punch the bar. Pissing their second thoughts. Tiny tits in big hands. Skimpy thongs wedged up huge asses.

The dance floor humping the music in languid lurches. The foreplay of strobe lights.

The downstairs gasping from below. Of lavender candles burned down to the dish. And chunky heeled boots piercing his ears. The night purring like a cat giving birth. To doorbells unheard.

The afterward in textiles. Red. Blue. Brown. Fits of solitude like corkscrews pulling the plug from champagne bottles. We go to sleep together and wake up alone. Stale with contrition fast to the soles of our shoes. The metaphor subsides and waits for our input. While we hunt and peck our way to happiness.

The dashboard choking through the dark. Straightening slowly against the girth of the distance. All melted sugar. Hot molasses on my spoon. The tired houseflies sanity breeds when there's nothing left to want.

The snore of tomorrow explaining everything.


The afterward. In colors. In textiles. As if we knew each other.

stubborn stairs
envelop the corridor

tadpole footed frogs catching
flies with their mouths sealed

the princess in her parlor
executing the pea
the actress in the park
giving shakespeare's ghost
a blow job

as if he'll remember her
after its over.

There really isn't anything attractive about life. The carpet in four hour yawns. The weight of cold sores on rotten mattresses. The cold autopsy in each dream. Every death is a suicide if you examine it closely.

The wheeze of the walls as they try to breathe. A fairy tale for the senses. The shudder of the bed in stirs of skin. In heavy gulps like bodies do when presented with the connundrum of choice. The kind of nightmares that make me want to sleep. The doorbells in the morning that seem to know when to ring.

The peep hole in every heart. Not really showing, but trying to warn us. About the strangers we think we recognize.

In the leak of the chime like sandpaper against. In the swing of the door automonimous. Either by physics or by happenstance. I'm drawn into the opening.

More a stranger to myself than any of them.

Listening for the invitation never sent.

I imagine myself as tactful. Studious pupil of diplomacy. Fly on the wall of their hearts. Eyes divided into a hundred images of a single face. True to the algebra of the skin. Accurate in theory. False in practice.

Sowing our conversations in drama and hyperbole. I've died a thousands times just to live one day. I've loved a hundred men just to prove one could love me.

I imagine myself a beauty queen. With her breasts taped to her dress. The Vaseline on her smile. Factoring how many of them would've loved me if.

I busy myself with scooping the dead seeds out of old jack o lanterns. Leaving the costumes to the optimists.

To carry on the burden of disguise.

So the cartoon began to speak. In Arrogant hiccups. Things unsaid loping one frame at a time. Through the aristocracy of happiness shunning. The elite motherfuckers we love more than ourselves calling our bluffs. It's not unrealistic. We are. Of course it was complaining. Why would it say anything otherwise. Thick with ointment. To smother the sting. The sad parole of lives from one prison into the next.

The rag dolls in the the crease of the pillow. Counting the belt loops in his jeans. The snake of his fingers as they poison her with pleasure. The bite of the horsefly. The crimson of the summer. Like so many men pretend to know.

The overdose in her nightgown. The only bit of her he had left to love.

It was so loud. An airplane taking off inside my head. Men. Women. Children. Poverty in every bite of chicken salad. A concentration camp of an eatery. Throngs of people. Old and young trucked in from every corner of the county. To pay twenty dollars for soup and a sandwich. Twenty dollars to scream your choice of bread at the girl behind the counter. Twenty dollars to carry your tray to the last empty table and chew until the hunger subsided.

Getting up to refill my waxy cup of soda it seemed fitting to be stranded in the middle of the world. Surrounded by people. Fouled by the engorged cancer of humanity. If this was anyone's hell, it had to be mine.

Twenty dollars to ponder why I ever left the house. It's a bargain. To sit over my chicken salad and gloat about the futures of their children. To be so sure they're wrong.

All the cities I've been to have never been so loud as this. Surround sound chaos. The symphony of the scraping chairs. As old women straighten to leave. The scrape of forks through dwindling salads as young ladies disembark from their laptops. All the sandwiches I've eaten never as satisfying. Twenty dollars. For chicken salad and to be glad I wasn't chosen.

The tedium of life endlessly chasing itself. Frantic christmas lights someone forgot to disconnect.

I fiddled with centering the bed. Like a new mother fusses with the blankets on her infant. Like an astronomer plays with the stars he imagines to be his. Skipping rope at every favor. Childhood rhymes purchasing our futures on credit.

Wiping the mirror. Cleaning the entire room with store brand Windex. Fragrant bursts of ammonia kissing my boredom. With a nausea so delightful only a poet could love it. The fallacy of living.

The drug. Sound in its dogma. The proverbial stitches. Coming undone. All the gods of the Greeks. Of the Romans. All gone. Relegated to myth.

All the gods of every empire proven false once history is written. Every god except addiction.

It's only easy when it's hard he said. Thick puddles of suspicion thundering like concrete thickening. In fragile tsunamis made of trust. You can hear them hardening if you listen close. A stampede of messiahs each as mortal as the one before.

Frozen eyes unable to blink. Stale headlights throbbing in the dusk of the televison.
Seeing highways where there were only parking lots.

If the answer isn't to be found in another cigarette then I am never to find it.

Eight. Nine. Ten.

Counting the hairs on my leg. Stopping at one thousand and one. Just because its close enough to zero. The abstract of a yellow light cautioning in the distance. Like the wink of a great monster with secrets to tell.

In statues made of skin. With eyes too big. We waited for the artist to return. To fondle these shapes. Manipulate the strict geometry of reason. As we had tried to do and failed. As we had imagined everyone must have done.

The child spoiled by the epiphany. The pavement scored by the sun.

I think I've woken up alone. But the sheets say different.

Take the elevator. I'll meet you there. Take the last of the daylight. I don't want to see.

Eight. Nine. Ten.

The dummy's in the courtyard. Swollen in his stance. Consoling the living with paper ladders. I'm high, but never high enough. To break the glass.