There was far too much waiting involved. Delete partition. Add. Format. Serious waiting. An entire day for it to ask me what time zone I occupied. And after that. Surprise. Waiting some more. When the box that contains my soul was finally functional again I counted the fonts. Realizing I had forgotten to save the ones I wanted. I noted the songs that were left. And studied the question mark in device manager that insisted I had forgotten something I'd done a thousand times before.

It's not as though there was something wrong. Just that right had gone lax.

If there is one thing technology has taught me it's to make backups. Because nothing is permanent.

I do better with pipes than I do people. I understand machines. Am lost in skin. I make up stories because the words are waiting. And we are gone.

I am yellow. I am brick. I am the curtain in front of and the microphone between. Myself and the wizard. Omnipotent and powerless.

Like everyone. I was born blind. And deaf. And mute. And nothing about that has changed except how loudly I'm willing to scream.

I am sold to the highest bidder. Purchased by virtue of want. Alone in this fairy tale of touch. As calm as an hourglass letting each minute disperse in a mass suicide of moments.

I've never written a song.

Never heard the phone ring so loud as it did then. In little bits of hysteria. And I could be myself again. In the fascism of alcohol. In the communism of poetry. I could still find freedom. As much as anyone would want. As little as any heart would wish.

I've never been that young. To kneel down and assemble their faces. Like breaking pastels over the page. A hurricane of colors asking permission from of the emptiness. Young in the way all victims are. With spoiled neckties and borrowed tuxedos. Young in contrast to what I can still recall.

I've never sung a song. But I've heard thousands. Little mosquito bites on my brain coaxing the blood to the surface. In cryptic maps. Of names kept. Secret invitations into their desperation. In complexions of destination paler than I'd imagined.

I can't sing. I can't even cry. To proposition hope for another chance. I can only watch. The ghosts as they assemble. The sanity of surrender as it confesses what I've always known about myself.

I'm determined to die. I'm not willing to try them on again. Wear those liars as I would saviors. Argue with those coffins until dying was the reward.

I started my vacation time on Tuesday by cleaning out the drain pipes for the two upstairs sinks. A nosebleed and a half later everything was flowing as it should. Using some string I got the drain stoppers back in their seats. Anyone can scrape out sludge. But when your daughter does it you're almost impressed. And if she happens to also be your little sister you wonder what other dirty jobs she's done.

My legs are sore from all that kneeling. To disconnect all those pieces. Only to put them together again. My fingers are calloused from turning all those fittings. Open. And from struggling to seal them up.

I cleaned the inside of the glass that holds the portrait I once drew of a skinless man. Forgetting my pain I left my blood on the back of the metal frame that had stolen finger from skin. I hung it again over my bed. Because forgetting pain is what people do best. And my own blood on such a piece of art seemed all too appropriate. A bit of DNA to give life to all the ways I'd pursued to take it away.

I began the email and never finished it. Slurring the text more than I could allow myself to send. I began an email thinking I was doing him a favor. Only to wake up certain I had been trying to kill myself again.

In every way that I loved them there was surrender. It was in my loneliness I finally found triumph.

Knowing. Confident at last. That there was no reason to pick up. When they would decide I might be useful again.

The want. Divided into sections of skin. A desert of dolls with lipstick on everything but their lips. A waterfall of lovers teasing barrels. A lie as believable as any truth. A change too close to ignore. A tortoise chasing a hare. As if anyone will remember the winner.

The suicide of want compulsively teaches us what was never ours.

I've never been able to decide if love is necessity or science. But either way it's nothing special. I've dressed the part. Played the character. Not that it wasn't genuine. Just that I felt obligated to condition.

It's strange how instead of healing me, it only made me worse.

But as with any drug, I still wanted more of it.

There are rehabs for every kind of chemical dependence. Yet no one questions our health when we're addicted to flesh. Or someone's indifference to our affection.

They warn us about heroin and cocaine. And even drugs as tame as pot. But there are no warnings about the dangers of love. There are no rehabs for rejected lovers. No drug to simulate the punch of the first kiss.

I don't mind being alone. I'd just like a choice sometimes. Between everything and nothing.

There were faces like ripe dandelions. To wish upon. Lovers like funnel cakes hot and smothered in melting confectioners sugar. Lives stalled in the blink of videotape. As it would wink at us from behind the gauze of crippled moments. Stuck on pause.

There was nail polish in heavy doses. And short skirts that were never short enough. The thunder of chunky heels as the doorbell whispered perfect manias. In cliches of skin.

It couldn't be any easier. Couldn't be any harder. To wake up. To go to sleep. Broken umbrellas. Handcuffed to the storm that's all around us.

It doesn't hurt. It doesn't say anything at all. As I ask my questions. As I beg it to speak. It does nothing. It does everything.

It changes me for the better. For the worse. Turning the pain into meditation. Turning the disease into treatment.

The cure looms larger as I indulge the weakness. Like a hammer above a coffin in a nail. I am flattered by the sickness. How well it treats me. It's so easy to love myself when I'm hopeless. It's easy to see why those plastic dolls have teeth. When there's still so much flesh to chew on.

We get high together. But we're never even close.

A spider crawled behind the molding. A yellow light stopped my car. My mood swimming between pink floyd and mudvayne. We watched as they engineered love for profit. And considered how science had failed us.

We sat outside as the sun finally boasted through the clouds. I imagined a smaller world. Where the moments belong to us. Where sex is not an obscenity. And love is not a flaw.

Taking into consideration all facets of my downfall I decided I had not lost. That no one had won. I was just more aware of my defeat. I just didn't want to try anymore.

Writers... poets... they talk to themselves quietly. So no one else should hear. Until they're sure they've said what's most flattering of their frailties.

I lay down each night perfectly sedated. I tell these stories because all the real ones are gone. There is life in fiction. There is salvation in addiction if you look hard.

And that's where I am. Sober enough to know I'm losing. Drunk enough to let it happen.

The little lamb with red hooves. Sheared too close. The partitions of the darkness. Wind and moon in riddles of indulgence. Little men in hungry poses searching for their underwear. Treasure chests spilling open as I get the closer.

\\

How I want to be. How I am.

\\

Chosen. But not kept.

The thump of people in my pulse.

Remember Me

Forget Us

The past like sheers on the window. Turning the light into pretty colors it never was. A cardboard keel for a paper boat. In an ocean of men. In an excuse I'm tired of. Being yourself is not your right. It's a privilege.

There aren't enough women to give your life meaning. Nor few enough to make it intentional. You've nothing to fall back on. Because you are who you are. Good luck to you.

You're right. No one should change you.

That burden is yours.

There's the bomb. And then there's the place it hits. We aim, but often miss.

I paste my loves together from the scraps I have. I've pasted together countless utopias from the arrogance of men. You're no different.

It's difficult to recall, but I originally started this blog to discuss with myself just one thing. Addiction. The isolation it glamorizes. The threat of recovery. Or at least self-preservation. How it impacts my efforts to destroy myself.

Exaggeration? Not really.

I've since gone on an 'artist's bent'. For a good year. Maybe longer. Clarity is a fickle muse. I thought I knew what I wanted. To suffer. and then recover. To become intimate with addiction. So intimate in fact that it wouldn't want me anymore.

But the truth is, the uglier I get the closer we become. The fact is, I written every word the skeleton has shed. And still it's not naked.

Not even close.

In fact, I've lied the entire time. About experiences. About moments that only happened because I created the fiction. What's real is nothing to write about. Nothing that can do any words justice.

What's real is I've overcome nothing. And still ask the same questions I pretended to answer a long time ago.

Truth is like a zipper. You pull it down. Open the teeth. See what's behind the fabric. And you close it knowing you will get bitten.

I used to think all I needed was to be wounded. Then I could heal. I tried writing. All my life I've been writing. When I should've been saying.

Goodbye.

I wish I had a better reason. But right now, weakness will suffice.

Out the window. I looked. Monsters in tuxedos drinking vermouth. And telling stories about knots in old bras. Tumblers yawning with melting ice and euphemisms for rape. Pageants of paper dolls. Cut so carefully with backward scissors. All wilting in a casual storm. Iodine turning fresh blood into vinegar. New wounds into scars.

Out the window. Little islands everywhere. Parked like cars. Clown faces on sad bones. Men undressed by the children they once loved. Each touch just a sample. A worm to catch the fish. Every word an asterisk. Anyone could've been there.

Burlap sacks are my confessions. In path and intention. They chafe what's within. Dutifully and without remorse. Clarifying the world out there.

Out the window. Proud in the darkness. My lore and my sin. My monsters. shedding their skins. Desperate Jacobs building ladders out of sex.

Climbing so high.

So that's just who you are. I understand. You can be an asshole. I should understand. And love you anyway. It's not my place to change you.

It's yours.

You can waste your whole life telling yourself this is who I am. If they don't want me they're the ones in the wrong. Trying to change me.

And you'd be right. They shouldn't try to change you.

It's your right to be a lonely asshole for as long as you want.

If you don't want to change I don't want to change you. But I don't have to like who you are.

Woken up in his underwear. In the midst of a greedy yawn. The spoils of drunk epiphanies laboring against the current of his tongue. Each minute a victim drowning. Every orgasm a lifeguard.

Save me from whomever it is I want tonight. Save me. Like a firefly caught in a jar. The darkness my only friend. The fables of truth pounding up and down our stairs. Lonely ghosts with no one left to haunt. The mucous in their punctuation as they try to talk.

Little monsters in soft shoes. Trying to memorize the dance. Gentle ogres betrayed by the fairy tale.

The spell.

Of princes wihtout their clothes.

Sour.

There is a tide in the skin. An undertow to touch. If i could only focus on one person long enough to drown again.

There is the night. Tiny mirrors breaking at random. There is sex. One of the many impotent addiction of the flesh. We never get high, but we're always hung over from it. We never say it matters because it doesn't.

There's a tea kettle whistling on the stove. There's a swipe in his grunt. The dull of blackboard after the lesson is done. I'm always inspecting those moments for answers. And much to my dismay. Finding them.

I can't make it wrong. Can't make it wrong. I"m just a little wrinkle in a sea of dirty sheets.

The casual manias of lovers trying to be friends.

You were ugly. You were beautiful. Paradise in a rainstorm. Earth turning to mud. So serenely becoming filth. As everyone does.

Closing the curtain. I could open it and be anywhere. On the tip of a cat's claw fresh with the mouse's blood. On the scent of beer in his breath as he stumbles into bed. Pieces of chewing gum the street left on our strut. The cackle of sex obsequiously condoning our rituals of self-destruction.

The night turns up its wrists and dares me to guess. At what it takes to live. I toy with the backgrounds. A dismal frustration of logic. Teddy bears having heart attacks. Drowning fish. I pick out a clean shirt. But they get dirty so fast.

The infinite mercy of memory is that it always. Always lies to us. The mercy of wisdom is that it tells us the truth.

Happiness is a prude. Love a tease.

Hurt is sexy. Pain is a slut.

Just be me for a while. Like you used to do. In a hurricane of alcohol. Both dream and nightmare. If such things are more than our memory of each other. Long curtains thick from ceiling to floor. Pregnant with the views we overlook.

Just say you'll change. Though I know you never will. And we can close our eyes and coax this dream to continue.

Just lie. Pretend you love me and I will believe you. Living the lie for as long as it can stand to live with me. Because alone is no place for a child. And even less a place for a woman. I should know by now how it feels. Or else be able to prove it's untrue.

I know it is.

Not true.

Those angels dressed as demons selling their real estate in the better neighborhoods of hell. Those strangers you tell yourself are friends. This compass you call your heart pointing north forever. And I still don't know where I am.

Because if it was, I would've found it by now. Or it would've found me.

If there's no love for the lost. There's no love for anyone.

In a blurry bed. Swimming in a focusing skin. In a past I can't remember. In a future where I don't exist. There are no pillows to hold our heads. There is no sex to quench our flesh. There's only a camera that blinks slow enough to find us in that darkness.



little voices. littler men. older now. negotiating with the vagaries of clarity. pulling down on the paralyzed eyelids of broken dolls. what do they see? what do they remember? of blurry beds. and dirty sheets.

In pictures we drown. In images we suffocate. nervous outlines. terrified of the filling in. coloring books of lovers. crayons of friends. looking for their labels in the vanity of touch. always surprised by the turn of the page.

I am human. Only capable of loving what will love me in return. I am a god. Only interested in those who will worship.

my trouble is i don't want anymore. so i wait to be wanted. lost amongst the tall lies. a thick harvest of ironies cut with the dull blade of naivete. a perpendicular of art and circumstance teasing the child into some half-hearted confession of colors much brighter than her actual experience.

she draws in color and paints in black. filling in every line as she sees it.

empty.



One guess at a time circulating an answer in fallen leaves. That this dying could give me my life back. That living is only a byproduct of death.

Maybe then I could learn. How to want again. Or at least what makes one wanted. in the ugly lines that separate the colors of lover and friend.

There were phones to not answer. The coach of alcohol like some grave mentor. It knows proudly what she's only known in shame. In darkness usually reserved for the dead. Sounds she could sparsely recall. Crawling through the womb in weighted gloves. There were so many people to ignore. It was hard deciding which nothing to choose. It was a strange euphoria arriving at last at that grave.

There were people to forget. Conversations to remember. A ballet of crippled demons. Fires to set. Plastic eyes to open. Years to tinker with. A cirucs of gears. Like clown faces drawn in ink on every blank page. Just to prove we can't erase.

There were phones to not answer. Calm pirates of the heart. Burying their treasures. Drawing maps. To places that can't be forgotten.

In memories that glow in the dark. Frail fences negotiate the margin between what is gone and what's been lost. Truth pricks us numb. A swarm of hungry mosquitoes consume us and we feel nothing. No pain. Or loss. Of any kind. Except the broken face of the doll on the floor. Her clothes not fitting. Her hair not kempt. Her plastic eyelids stuck. Like a cold sore clinging to a hungry lips.

Love and suicide are not that different.

They both want to hear the doll cry again. To find the voids in all these yards of flesh. And stop them from reaching the source.

In every mold. In every squandered smile. The bed it yawns of such plastic skin. Stretched and taut and willing to snap. Undress the doll and show her its holes. Shame like a lion's roar shakes her bedroom. Alone with imaginary jackals the lines draw themselves across her skin. In lies of happiness. In habits of devotion.

In hours.

In years.

In seconds.

The cracks in the doll remove over her clothes.

We laugh in haunted spasms. In cold coughs lacking breath. Crab apples to the shins of little boys running. Shoves from behind to the backs of strangers(friends). Tall on their telephone boxes. Victims of their vast imaginations.

They all fall down. Under the right amount of pressure.

They all fall down. If you're patient.

Sit on this frail branch like a nervous vulture. Long neck remembering past feasted of carrion. The bouquet of death a perfume for the hunger. Like an empty fishing hook. Or a child in her tiny bed. Lost on a ladder of nightmare. Consumed with knowing what happened in the world while she slept.

We all feed on the dead.

Just some of us do it better.

The back of her hair is straight. The front a little lopsided. Just like the words are when she opens her mouth to say them. All bouncing balls and candyland. Winking dice molesting cardboard personas. Their plastic pedestals failing.

I could be cliche and say it's karma. But I just think it's ironic. That where I once was is where you are now. Sometimes sympathy is a cactus. Bleeding aloe to soften the wounds it makes.

Maybe we're always desperate. Always lonely. And the reprieve is just when we can be still. Perhaps we've always been lovers. All this while. And this nothing was our salvation.

Sleeping in a bed of ink. Warm under a blanket of pages. Resting my head on a pillow of forgotten faces. If they remember me, I'll never know.

Letting them go isn't enough. Letting them go is only the beginning of learning how to love them.

Finding the fossils. Cataloguing the evolution of touch. In every pore of my skin. The dirty pimples of pleasure erupting in my cheeks. The lava of a kiss overflowing. Eradicating all those come before it.

The blank chalkboard of a girl in love brazenly straddling Darwin's ghost.

I'm gone. Away from myself. The homily of casual sex resounding. Thudding. Pounding. Like club music to the seizures of bad dancers. In stutters of strobe light across frantic patches of skin. A maze of bee stings and ointment that turn all these scars to puddles of mud.

If only I were as weak as I accuse myself of being. I could gather those lies like people into a big auditorium. And they'd assume anything I said was true. I could make their lives better. Or worse.

Depending on my mood.

I could make pictures instead of just drawing them. And sleep without having to dream at all. And the future would give us gentle encouragement as we learned to walk.

again.

It's just your average bible story of resurrection minus a few gods.

Telling the stories to the keyboard. In brief orgasms of inspiration. The sparse pulse of fireflies in the cough of the waning sun. Small lies to build a larger truth. Empty chalkboards still dressed in the ghosts of expired lessons. The stubborn geometry of expectations. Did it hurt enough. To change me? So that the next time I'll know better than to wait.

For it to come to me.

Will I wake up beside myself in a sweat of surrender. Or will I sleep in tiny victories.

Knowing we were never really there.

Little bits of time travel in every lover.

I lose my place. The outlines take over. One drop too much is all it takes. To turn that glass into a grave. One color shy of a rainbow. In the stare I can still remember. That studied me like some sad microscope. Searching for evidence of hope in the casualties of its gesture.

Without a war. Without a cause. Love filters through us. A weak poison. As pedestrian as life is. Wet sidewalks in every gaze sheepishly conforming to the march of happiness across our skin.

The future is all duct tape and tears. Strangers clothes were wore because it hurt enough to change. Fabric and glue deciding for us how hard it'll be. Holding together what's falling apart. Convincing lives to collide. Cracking hearts like eggs.

The future isn't ahead of us. It's right there. In every bite of flesh that convinces us we're still hungry.. Not because it has anything to offer. But because tomorrow looks so much like yesterday did.

When you're yourself this long. When you've been with every kind of man. It's not hard to know what the antidote is.

The only wisdom in this kind of learning is regret.

Wolves in the courtyard. The smug grin of hungry beasts. Like the attitude of forgiveness all lives scar. The stick of needles drugged with false cures for imaginary diseases. The crying clown. With its white tears. The orgasms of gods to entertained to care.

In the short hairs. In the tragedies we call lives. Every face a poison that's taste is worth dying to know. In years thick with the briefest of heavens. I'm still an atheist. Ready to face the nothing that comes after.

Dying is birth. Pain is happiness. And goodbye is forever.

Sorting through that grim fairy tale. Death is a only technicality. Hell is wondering what they meant. Did they say it because you wanted to hear it. Or was it really how they felt.

In the summer we wait for the winter. In the winter we long for the heat. In love we sink ourselves. Fleshy, heavy anchors into a chaotic ocean of people. As if there is a bottom. Something below the surface to keep us together.

Have you ever seen the fat hookers in Amsterdam pitching out their buckets of cum? Have you ever wondered if sex was the closest you'd ever get to god?

in the way we see everything
steeped in our losses
sour with days we'd
thought forgotten
and so unusually romantic
as is every broken heart

the night makes promises
the morning never keeps
under rumpled sheets
between tried bodies
quiet sobs search the
silence for moments
that were missed

in fits of futility
as soiled as pleasure
sorrow becomes vision
and we can see in the darkness
obsessed with a future
we can only see through
hope's too perfect
binoculars

scribbling on the shadows
in palettes of sweat
colors she imagines
when none are present

eyes wide open
to see the nothingness
between her legs

not a word to say
or fool to write of
now that she can see
what never was

Coaxing the world into your fantasy with a heavy rub. Masturbating on the frailty. Of hands about to collapse. The pale they wrote on their crutches. The dark of dead limbs moving through fallen clothes. In a headache of kisses.

The pneumonia of pleasure. Making it hard to breathe. Making them our only medicine. But the sickness become me. And I learn to love how harsh it is. The sickness croaks out its winner in a slot machine of sex.

And I'd spend a thousand people to win just one.

The treble of silence. As assuming as a peacock's tail. Of my desire to be relieved of myself. In habits bigger than I am. While we wait. The verses of tired ovaries. Whisper against the sheets. Of lives that will never be. The red sex we almost had. The spill of my sanity from this drink. Releasing my skin from it prison of memory.

The callous needlepoint of memory. In pleasant stitches. Too accurate. The devils. In their horns. Broadway in a bucket. Shovel and pail castle enough. The grandmother in the rocking chair. The tug of the radio at her bosom. While the words decide what they'll mean. While the sentences crash like waves into what's left of us.

The liars... they're the only ones you can trust. Wearing you life in occasions. Fragile gardens coming into bloom. Like skin preparing to open. Swallow us.

They'll say it's over. And yes, it is. But you won't miss them. Just how easy they made it to hate yourself.

I don't sleep anymore. I just lie down and arise later unaware of what transpired between then and now. The pretty peacocks self-destruction flaunts in therapies of bad behavior.

Humility bites its lip. To be fetching. As all girls are oblidged to do. Stick out their legs so that someone will stumble. Inventory the males and decide which ones to keep.

The flattened parachutes of lovers fallen. Little toll booths along the highway of the heart. Checking to see how lost we are.

But I was different because I wanted to be lost. Always did. For them to look and not be able to find me. For them to feel just once like I do all the time.

Where all the words disappear like snowflakes melting. Where every storm is a blizzard that makes it easier to see. How far I could've fallen. How little I actually did.

Because the world is full of unhappy people. And I'm just one of them.

Those puddles at your feet, look closer, they're probably someone you thought you could love.

If we were only this. Just a maze of veins. To be solved. A chalkboard of skin. To write upon. And be erased without consequence. Then i could understand. Why the hurt grows so big only to shrink back down into nothing.

We are true or false questions. The vague geometry of loneliness tutoring the soft angles in the heart. We are god. Responsible for the happiness of everyone around us. We are the Satan's who take the blame for all their misfortunes.

If we were only what we wanted to be I'd be nothing. But we're still. Always have been what they want from us.

Discarded apple cores envious of the pie in the oven. Pillows with names I can't recall. Hairs on the sheets that still wreak of all the men who made me glad to be a whore.

That overlooked bastard child of love and sex that makes it almost possible to love yourself again.

Each life is its own crippled avalanche. Each life has a pedestal. A place for the things it can't have. Some are stable. While others need to fall.

An avalanche of flesh. Slinkies down her throat. Rubber balls under her dress. The rain on the window. Her sadness in syndication. More valuable with every frown. A comic book of sorrow. Memory in pages. In dark ink outlines.

Still waiting.

To be colored in.

A subdued thunderstorm. An empty bed. Doll's eyelashes caught between a blink and a stare. The sky tumbles down in floods. The sheets draw their sketches. In shades of touch. Lost to the abyss of each other. We paint the doors so red. We count the steps on the porch. Sold to the feeble arithmetic of lovers.

Continents of skin still defying oceans of experience.

The truth in pin pricks. My needle. In your haystack. Searching for itself.

He gloated in the rhyme of indecision. Buoyed by the paranoia of sex. He took off the glove and wore her closer. In hurried jabs. In a fragile vase of utopia that was broken before he let it go. The prison of happiness coming into focus one fuck at a time.

The arithmetic of love calculating our parts. In numbers too small. In fractions of skin. To decimals too precise. To lies we never had the chance to tell. The numb of the future. Needles stabbing their pictures into empty eyes.

The pull of the past. Like a run in your stockings. The sour of the future. Like some phantom pregnancy. Bloated with all the things you thought you wanted.

Calm because you know the abortion is coming.

The little fish in a big net. The little fish biting down on the big hook. The little fish in the big ocean.

Batman was in the oven. Robin the microwave. Spoiled like the beer skins we discover on the surface of the bottles after a long night of being ourselves.

The anatomy of loneliness drawn in stretch marks on the glass. Sober little smiles flaunting the comedy of addiction. A thousand summers in my palm. Writing the future. In crochets of skin. A thousand more winters in my pocket. A warrior and a cripple. The crime of epiphany. Singing. Loose change. A coin toss of decisions. A chess board in our thoughts. A bishop in your stare. A pawn in your finger.

I always intended to lose. I just never meant for it to be so obvious.

A million little locks in my skin suddenly opening. With just one key.