We fucked. As loud as we could. Hammers coming down on the sheets. Breaking gods in half. Limericks of Solomon as sharp as dial tones. To keep it in pieces or to lose it whole. The servitude of choice becoming clear.

Her eyelids in shambles. Betrayed by his hesitation. Road maps she'd drawn prematurely spilling the dark of her happiness all over her cheeks. In tides of mascara thinned by tears. The color of her lipstick devouring the smile once on her face.

Crawling into her bed gloat by gloat of the addiction. Closing the curtain on all things.

Turning to the tide for a reason it keeps coming back. It doesn't say, but I know it's thinking I haven't been listening.

The bachelor in his leather coat. Purring harmlessly.

The princess sleeping on her pea.

The future on its clearance rack. Waiting for us to find the big bargain.

Plucking the eyelash. Studying the moist root that caused it to stand up on her fingertip. A black rainbow reaching for heaven.

Killing. A child in each stab. Finger painting mostly in red. The dead men in her bed waking her up earlier than usual. The drawings. Cutting the fabric to fit missing arms. To hide the demon's genitals. Words. An abortion. Vacuuming the life from her cunt.

In a pale anesthesia.

The show. Predictable. Wooden joints creaking out their poems. In thin splinters. In swells of skin that are not quite brave enough to push out the infection.

Her fingers comb her hair. Building upon the seduction. Her skin wears her in sudden bursts. Explosions of emotion shed their wrappers. And the chocolate is melted.

Stale coffee hushing itself in the morning's vomit. Skin chalkboards littered with their fingerprints. Time our lawyer against a jury of drug. Little pinholes in the meat of us devouring the spices. Little traps in the hunt severing their feet.

The jauindice of love clarifying rapidly as the walls tumble in. Weak maneuvers of weaker vctims turning this raw meat into sustenance.

Without flavor. Without wish. We bite down. So sure this hunger will release us. Without taste. Without skin we look to the oven for redemption. And though its breath is hot I am cold as ever.

Fouled by the plates I've decorated with names not mine to say anymore.

I don't see how they can treat words like gods when we mere mortals so easily manipulate them. If anything we are the gods that make them covet. If we are anything other than poets. We are people. Addicts. Carving the globe in tiny chunks.

The franchise of sober recruiting all kinds of men.

Drunk enough to know forgotten is an adjective.

That the world we sampled is bored of us.
Of recipes for happiness. Stale dragons. Erased. In coughs of fire. Lips of asbestos poroous with death.

In the tube when the lights go off deaf gods dole out tardy paychecks to the blind. In sobbing strangers and spermless men. In light trenchcoats that obliquely tell the city to shut up.

In the metro when the sun is strong enough to reach underground women exchange words. Communicating between languages. How to get to the Eiffel tower. Lick the penis of the world.

In the cafes. Smudgy faces draw upon trolleys and bicycle chains. The bells are rung. Mediocre sirens warning the lost to speed up their pace. In the haze of drug that drapes the city. A sheer nylon of high stuck on the foot of a windmill. An empty needle hanging from the arm of an unconscious country.

On the train. On the way to nowhere. Sober on airport Burger King. Sober on time changes. Profoundly resilient. Profoundly weak.

Navigating the underground. Paying for tickets. To places I'd never visit. The yellow lights warning us to prepare to go. All the streets like an open bridge. And us waiting for the ship to pass.

She adjusted her glasses. Balancing them precariously upon the slope of her nose. A small nose. An unimaginative breathing device culled thoughtlessly from the excess of her cheekbones. Wholly non-indicative of attention or ethnicity. A plain doorstop for the bottles thrown open to her lips.

Seeing is a strange phenomena. Casual and unrequited. Sticky notes lurching onto her thoughts in a yellow hail of passive suicides. The poison in the second hand trickling into her veins. Calm infections quietly filling her in with black.

Every road blotted out. The whole of the map completely useless. Staring at her arms in vain oblivion. The atlas of herself indecipherable. Every destination an inkwell. Each landmark lost.

Left alone.

With the moment she realized she always had been.

Sloughing down the moment in careful genocides. Death is the subculture. Of all races. Oppressed or otherwise. In slaves we trust. The ethnicity of addiction brought up for questioning. We pale beside our frailties. Broken shoelaces exacting their parade. Clowns with their trousers open. With their red noses in their hands. Watching patiently as the circus continues in their abesnse.

There is nothing. And there is everything. In the hunger of your madness. Like fireflies. Caught in a jar. Still bleeding through the dark. Still waiting to die. Random and unconcerned. with the path that led us here. The doorway takes big strides. I see its progress in the broken teddy bears. I wonder how. When. Or if. Those dolls will turn on us.

Barely vcitims in a ritual of words. The verb. Alive enough. The adjective suggesting.

Everywhere we've stepped. Every lie it took to build this world.

Sorted. Labelled. As such.

Words written in sweat. Erased.

Words fond enough with our medications to provide us our choice of heavens.

Words like murder. More than ready to kill us.

Fumbling with the moon he knelt to place it beside the bed. Seeing his future in the obtuse fragments of light that scowled through the thick lips of darkness. A vehement lip gloss staining the creases in his sight.

Struggling with the door she decided to stay in the room. The lock would surely repair itself if she were patient. Counting the walls that contained her.

One.
Two.
Three.
Four.

Feeble pulses choked from a long and laborious resuscitation. Flecks of caramel clinging to discarded papers. With bold name brands that need not repeating to remember. And a hint of some face she presumes has to be hers. Though it's not at all familiar.

Just a mime tucked into the clothes she no longer wears. A splotch of red pasted to empty cheeks. A spasm of skin. Swimming over her bones.

One.
Two.
Three.
Four.

I know where I am. Where I've been. Touch lost in transit. Silent songs. The sun rises in spite of us. But it's no less dark.

Free enough. Even if we're only free to falter. There are many women who will love a man simply because he loves her. But not many men willing to do the same. There are perpendiculars. The awkward angles of memory. Falling into their slots. Obscene jigsaws solving us. In percussions of flesh. And bits of underwear still to wash.

Some pale orchestra whispering loudly senile symphonys. Too forgoetful to name why it still hurts. Too medicated to prove anything is real. A braid in her hair. Long, narrow and reticent. The spice of dying in every meal we share. Dirty trenchcoats cloak the detective. As he wanders the miles between the clues. Performing his deductions in heavy breaths. Doing his arithmetic with trembling legs.

Waiting for the murder to be ready. Waiting on the victim to lean into. The soft leather jackets that separate criminals from artists.

The broadcast of hopelessness is universal. Impotent. Incredulous demigods in the spoils of nakedness. Happiness is seeing them struggle when you're gone. Candy canes sucked sharp and dangerous. Sweet daggers carved with a kiss.

Briefs cinemas of skin choking in and out of focus. The actors in our pants shivering with the dialogue missed. Subtitles on their trousers failing to communicate. A story. A simple prick of character. A beginning. A closeup of her face like a needle out of heroin. Their touch perfectly poisoned apples. Rotting.

The little plays we create each night. Togehter. And alone. The stages caoxed from old spice and used condoms. A habit. A ritual. A friend. A gift.

Foul with confessions of weakness.

Spoiled by want.

Drawing first in pencil. And then in ink. Drawing in squints and guesses. As blind as life demands. As acurate as life isnsists. Each person a new drug. A new hole to make in veins salready perforated with lovers.

There in the highways of her dress. I drove. Through the red lights. Through the construction. And dead ends. To name the streets she'd always kept anonymous. To focus on the gravel that finessed me forward. To smell the sewer at the fringes of her vagina. And become intoxicated.

The moral I found was that the moral need not be present to divine a destination from an aimless path. Sex is a fable of tremendous proportions. Ogres of skin pulling on frail scaffoldings of trust. The callous of diagrams paused to worship gods hardly enviable.

My disease could've been coaxed into remission by anyone of them. But I chose to remain faithful to unhappiness. The angles of sobriety diminishing the journey that lay under her dress.

Until I gave in to the ease of toiling open zippers. A prostitution of love unlike any drug could emulate. The power I found in manipulating their penises. Euphoria has yet to match. The satisfaction I discovered helpless resonating like foul panties I'm forced to wear. Anything to be ugly again. Anything to forget I wasn't where I am now.

I'm too man to suit another man. Too woman to love another female.

So I proceed to love myself in quixotic doses. IN careful measures of a past I cherish.

I'm content enough just to have the love of the colors on the walls. Maple syrup kisses of the dusk. Caramel apple lips of the dawn. In scant bikinis of alcohol knotting off its top. After a long bake in the cinema of sex.

That last taste curdling before it ever reaches my tongue. Swallowing the empty candy wrapper as therapy. In crinkles of cellophane. In a sweet, sweet downpour of the crumbs they forgot to consume. The situation with its shirt unbuttoned. With its condom in its pocket. Already used.

Walls staggering with the threat of us. Partitions of skin deciding our hearts. In a euphoric delirium of semen and sweat. The sheets like carbon. Saving copies of our every kiss. For me to investigate later.

They're just men after all. Rigid ghosts masquerading as flesh. Little doses of drug impersonating love. Faulty scales claiming to know the measure of a woman. Thieves with gift-wrapped fists. Santa Clauses with empty sacks.

The walls on all their faces the same.

No color.

The doors still locked.

No entry. No escape.

Just mannequins receiving his dick. In bitter chokes a clarity. In negatives of a future I can only see when I'm this high.

Graves drawn in pencil.

When I finally decided I had been used enough. It was more surrender than victory. More nysteria than logic. Convincing the wallls to look away as I undressed.

Naked for the first time. Naked forever. The suitable strategies of love still fresh in my mind as I left him.

The only thing real, what was gone.

Celebrating dying as we were seemed appropriate. Given that is the one thing we're always doing. Life surreptitiously killing us. In spits of love. In jousts of sex. Adding each tiny number to arrive at the sum of nothing.

He'll always be older than me. For the rest of our lives. This mediocre marathon that forces us to run when all we want to do is walk. These years. Each one briefer than the one before. Leeches in every touch.

You don't become Galahad overnight. There's a period of waiting for the grail to recognize your purpose. You don't go to sleep with your armor on, but that's how you dream. Too real to ever be rest. Too often to be genuine.

You don't fall in love the same way you write it down. Toiling over adjectives. Little gardens made of slate. Rigid flowers made of skin. Blooming. In burgeoning cracks. In weak stems that buckle under the weight of the sun.

Like I did. Like we were. Hoopeless enough to live.

Poor Goldilocks. She woke in the wrong bed. Innocent enough. The flaccid yardsticks we use to measure couched in terrestrial circumstances. He was an asshole. Truly. Busy organizing the asshole convention. When I interrupted. With other choices.

The sweat of kisses pooling thoughtless at the door to the tongue. In loud anthems that never bother to interrupt the words they've sung. Busy drums beating. Stolen skins stretched across. The trophies we didn't realize we'd won. The people. Like empty bottles. To discover come morning.

The dreams it won't let me recall. Nightmares thwarted. The thump of the lion's tail as cubs follow it across the continent. In search of the answer to this riddle they call hunger.

In search of the solution to this puzzle they call living.

The demons in taffeta. The gods in latex. They all echo the same response when I ask them how far we should go.

Far enough to know where I've been. Far enough that I know how close I was to never having to ask myself these questions again.

You're not an alcoholic until you've loved one. Not a poet until you've lost them. Or at least that is what I tell myself. When words are not enough.

It was a quiet rain in a loud storm. It was humble kind of sex. Like bitten nails. Half painted. Soft-spoken abortions in denim. The kiss of the zipper cold. The bite of its teeth bitter. The thrill of the hotel. The shame of it. Had I been drunk too I never would've fucked him. Wouldn't even have been there.

Most times it makes you stupid. But occasionally it turns little girls into men. Mostly it makes me wonder what I've forgotten. Am I glad I did. But every so often it turns pawns into queens.

The calm of the chessboard. In careful bites of the genius. The molten thighs of strategy. In spotted stockings. In borrowed dresses. Turning those borrowed rooms into destinations. Hard rain on soft roofs. In terminal parodies of ourselves we collect our loves in empty bottles. Each one heavier than the one before.

There were only antonyms. Sages facing away from the audience. The sparse wisdom of stupidity cutting newborn hearts in half. In big sips. From bottles bigger still. In vacations we never took. Beds we'd not shared. At bar we barely remembered. We became friends, but never lovers.

I couldn't love any of them sober even if I wanted to.

The moments mixing like cocktails. In tall glasses that saturate those tiny napkins we place under them. In blood that pours its words overlooked into the containers we've left. After everything is over.

I couldn't love anyone like this. I've tried.

I've devoured every fingernail. Twisted off all those caps. The turmoil of tomorrow arising in bittersweet fairy tales. Of princes bending down to kiss women not ready to wake up.

The lips on those moments moving too fast for me to read. I'm not deaf, but I may as well be. When you speak. I can't hear.

Don't know. What you're saying.

I'm all out of wax. All out of wick. All out of flame.

We're still pretending. In suitable prayers that someone's listening. The sadness is medicine. The silence is resilience. Learning to swim by drowning. Learning to live by dying.

He never said much to me. Just little suitcases on his way to somewhere else. Conveyor belts of skin waiting to pick up his luggage. I didn't say much either. But we drank a lot together. In apples on shaky heads. In arrows almost pointed at. A year's worth of cigarettes in one night's condition. Passing out with the phone. Waking up to the disconnect.

He would lie sometimes when he felt he had to. He would listen in deep breaths. Trying to calculate the impact of the dial tone on the dreams we would have. The child arguing with mirror. Because it can't be right.

There is only one window to look out. One to look in. A singular analogy of relationship. With all things living. And not. What we see on the other side of the glass. Out there. Beyond us. And what of us it reflects. Stalking the world in magnificent delirium. The proper smug of satisfaction in throbs of skin. Tire tracks still on the road years after the crash.

The ambulance is long gone. All the blood corrupt. But on rainy days the bones. They remember. Always remember where they were broken.

There is glass. Between what we see and what we think we've have touched. It's soft and it's young. But it's not transparent.

We get close enough to each other to make fingerprints. Smudges.

All we are doing is obstructing their view.

I'll tell you a story. I'll make it nighttime. Because then you won't know how wrong I am. I'll hold the flame close to my mouth and tell myself it's not the same. Though I know it's alike.

The dirt in the crevices of their shoes. The holes in the ceiling like fireflies looking for the moon. In stockings slipping down. Below the knees. In boots I wore only that one day. When the couch taunted. When alone meant together.

In soft equations. In men I once called sperm. The skid of bathrobes too wiling to choke the soap from filthy skin. Arrows pointed like spoons of heroin. Slipping into collapsing veins. Not the weakness. Only the need. Of liars pulling the knots from my hair. The eruption. Almost forgotten lunge. With leather jacket creaking hard. Against the dashboard. Thinning the years between us.

Until.

I was.

As old as you are.

The truth is I don't know what I've lost. Or that I've lost anything at all.

The fortune teller in his stare predicting the hour of my submission. Drawing the timeline in the tying of shoelaces and the combing of hair. Afterwards. A serene storm of questions I was always afraid to ask.

The want built its casinos. The sex installed its slot machines. Long corridors of losing. For the pleasure of it. Every conversation a hand of blackjack. Do I hit or do I stick? I've never been a fan of gambling. But when I think about it gambling is a mirror for all addictions. Constantly giving away what you have in the dire hope that it'll come back to you as what you want. The greater the loss, the more you're willing to bet on the next hand.

And when it's all gone. When you've nothing left to wager. Well, there's always something left to risk. If you're desperate enough to still think you can win. And that is the nature of addiction. Of depression. Each loss fortifies you with a new urgency to get to the next. Because it could be the one razor that's sharp enough.

It could be the room where you finally cut so deep. That it doesn't matter how you got there. Or what you wore. They'll only remember you as you looked then.

Pulling pieces of your skin from the sheets. Like confetti. Like needles. Like cocaine. Seeping into every corner of my memory. Until the only dreams I have are of dying.

The art of dismissing what you crave. The lawsuit in your throat pleading innocent. The jury in your bed deliberating just cause. In the hiss of beer bottles. On xanax wings and magic carpets made of semen.

I used to be an artist. Used to know how to draw. Faces I'd never seen. Portraits of people I'd never known. Isn't that what an artists does? Recognizes in strangers what they don't know of themselves. Isn't that was art is? Finding the voice in the part of us that cannot speak.

Now I'm just a discard. A cold raven that raps at empty chamber doors. Pecking at peots who don't listen. Culling the worms from lovers corpses to feed the desires of flightless birds.

In quixotic synonyms meant to spoil the distance between myself and them. Little boobytraps of words. To sort the analysts from the poets. The demon naked with whims of the flesh. Debating the meaning of the relapse. As I recover every night to the sanctuary of my destruction. The trial a parody of lovers in thick makeup. In giant shoes. In a circus of ambivalence. As every lover must appear to those so consumed with this sickness.

Pretty dolls with their feet chewed off. Beautiful dolls in the ugly clothes we've chosen for them.

When I hear that sound. The drug gasping for breath. A twist of my wrist. A repitition of the last five year's nights. In one fickle move the grail is found and lost again. When I dream as I did this morning of a woman, my lover, pissing on me while I sleep. And appalled demand to know why only to have her change into a man and begin comforting me. Isn't it obvious I seek safety in humiliation.

And occasionally even find it.

I think it's too late. No. I know it is. Did long before I had this dream. Or noticed the suffering in the things I always assumed existed solely to torture us. Drugs don't breathe. I just imagine it when I hear the sound. The keen release I have found in my destruction. Something I've always wanted finally in my power. That my hate for myself could be my salvation.

Before the old ladies pushed me down the hall and tried to feed me cookies. Before I shouted to wake everyone up and tell them of my grief. I'd already decided I would forgive her if she could answer my one question.

Why?

When she left without answering and I found myself being fondled by and fondling a man. It became clear. I didn't want the why as much as I wanted the now.

Some kind of comfort to make this destruction worthwhile.

Souvenirs in skin. The foul of sex barfing its art upon us. Like paint spilled. Hated. In sketches we can't resist coloring in.

The dogma. The composition. Of words in the birth pain. The threat of god a pawn to the addiction. The satire of salvation rolling over. Wagging its tail as we rub its belly. The moment in giant footprints marks the course. Indifference the measure. Of recovery. Of happiness. And the arc of the bridges that unite them. Should there we such a place Where every moment is composed of chewing gum. Bathed in saliva. Capturing every tooth mark. Each movement of the tongue. Tossing about inside our mouths. IN happy graveyards where we still find our answers in the dead.

A tremor in my brain is reason enough to decide. I'm still lonely, A man in my bed reason enough to regret ever having been a woman.

When I dream I'm never myself. Always a wave. A cloud. Or a mountain. Something immensely tall. Or high. Or strong. Something that has eons to solve its problems.

When I dream I'm never myself. Because what would be the purpose in that. I have to know everything I'm not before I can be certain of what I am.

I'll find out. Brick by brick. Comb by comb. As the hairs fall out of the doll's head. Eventually we'll see what she's thinking. As the clothes get dirty and the shoes grow old. We'll discover her weaknesses. We'll pull out her plastic tongue and find the words still glued to it.

I'll dream and see her dirty dresses in the yawns on the floor. Its wide mouth in a checkmate with its narrow heart.

Entropy. The science of loss. Confusing people for mice. Lives for mazes.

Entropy. The science of little stitches keeping big wounds closed.

A funny thing happened on my way to forgetting.



I didn't.

Even if you could swim you wouldn't want to swim that far. Better still just to drown there. Sure the water is listening. Draw in it. In colorless crayons. Wear it. Like running stockings. Overwhelmed with the imperfections of flesh. Bled down to the shoes that make us taller. Pooling in the heels that make us thinner. Sour love letters soiled by the time we let separate us. Sweeter for having waited.

If only we hadn't waited this long.

No words left to turn. Nor beds to make. Just us. In disjointed handshakes. In the leaky buckets we carry away from the source. Rushing to get back to where we never were.

Sad because it's over. Happy because we're not lost in it anymore. It's ours. We possess it. It's ours. We still dress it. In the clothes we used to wear.

Making the bed. Molar by molar. Chewing on then. With dulling teeth. That old prescription of wisdom and foolishness turning sorrow into epiphanies. He can't tell it, but I'm incurable. The drug that drugs take. He can't see it. No one can. Except that stranger in my head that speaks in Faulkner titles and Shakespeare tongues.

I'm a television. An image of senses that sight cannot convey. Scent. Fetid sprinkles of orgasm in the cup of cool underwear. Touch. The glycerin of warm skin poisoning the air. In thick strokes of forgetfulness. Giving away. Giving in. Giving up.

On the sun. On the tide. Everything that tries to change the world and always fails.

Born toothless. Doomed to die the same way. Soft felt cheeks tense too hard to kiss and the stitches on their lips come undone. Leaving these puppets without words.

His eyes drawing in thick tipped markers. His words tracing at best. The perfection lions. As they form their circle. To cut off the weakest. The dead of cubs in recent past. In rotting bones. Lost in the philosophy of animals. A vaccination of words slipping secrets of the disease into my veins. To cure me perhaps. Or else to prove it isn't fatal.

Just a moth caught in between our tv and the screen door. As anger began to fondle the weaker of our fears. In brief love affairs with nicotine. In fits of unprotected sex with alcohol. They all became more real than I wanted them to be. Actual people. As flawed as I was. Am. No one I could ever hope would cure me of myself. No one I could ever hope to save.

It was when I was drunk that I first saw them as they really were. Divided by zero. Rabbits caught in the farmer's fence. Liars sharpening their truths. In armors made of skin. In the easiest of words to say. In the most stubborn of touches. Dependecy swells. In the squawk of bad songs we are drawn to when. In the pose of tired models as we try to draw.

What it is we think we see.

What saw us when our eyes were closed.

There's resiliency in addiction. Going up that mountain every night to break those stones into pebbles. Creating pieces of the boulder small enough to throw across the water. Trivial journeys to the other side of myself. Endless rescue attempts. To save the woman stranded on the other end of all this drowning.

Sometimes. Some nights. I think I've had enough. Am drunk enough to reach her. Have finally brought her back with me. To this new world. Where the only love that matters is kept in bottles. And she concedes. The destruction began with trying to save her.

And in so many ways it has.

Saved us both.

In cheap storms I could buy away for pennies. We sunk nevertheless. I just wanted to know him. Forever never occured to me. I've never worn a wedding gown. Not even in my dreams. I've never been pregnant. Not even in my wildest fantasies. I just wanted to be close to someone. I just wanted to feel him breathing as he slept. Cinch up tomorrow like a garbage bag and wait for the trashmen to come collect us.

Throw it all away as soon as we were done with it. Get rid of it before it began to rot.

Cold ledgers. Every kiss a mortgage. I couldn't afford him. Wasn't even close. I couldn't buy love. Nor borrow it. The only thing I could do was seduce it. Because love must be a man. As ugly as it is. As much as it flaunts wishes it can't grant.

Love has to be a man. And trust a woman. Because it never learns. Is always ready to be beaten again. For a new chance to be broken. Swimming in the children she's not had. Refusing to accuse her killers. Unwilling to admit she's dead.

I don't want to love him. But I always will. The more he hurts me the better I will.
In discounted sundays I could purchase by the dozen. I trusted.

He was an ugly fuck. He wasn't ugly. The intercourse was. Oysters choking on their own pearls. Leaky buckets spilling drops of our clothes as we walked toward the bed. There's no staying covered in those situations. Those perfect epiphanies where the threat of orgasm makes us small enough. To fit inside each other.

Kisses milling about like ants on a dead cricket. Happiness a stopwatch. Counting off the seconds we have left. To break the promise. To go back to the lives we had. Find our way back inside those giant pants and pretend the zipper isn't as sharp as it was when it spit us out.

The dust on his shoulders. Little sculptures of apathy. Grey clowns in used makeup. In wardrobes of scars. And scabby shoes. Grey clowns with grey noses taking off their over sized shoes.

He wasn't ugly. His words were though. Sharp hooks through tender lips. Fishing. Always fishing. Catching and throwing back. He wasn't ugly, but his methods were. The criminal. The victim. The clown without his makeup. Trying to purchase a smile.

It's just a song. Words and music lying to us. Again.

It's just summer. We're trying to be born. Again. And we're failing. Broken pencils embedded in the paper. Stabbing those dead moments. Like bad drugs we wish would make us different. Or at least stranger enough to ourselves to justify what we've become.

The core of the apple. Little hotels of poison looking out at us from windows dark. Fables in reality. Burnt down to the wick. I'm your eve. You're my adam. But eden is impatient. Bored with us. The snake offers multiple choice. We can't pass. Everything is wrong.

It's at the end that the beginning is most clear. Some frail valentine. Some pale vampire harboring the blame. for every wrinkle in my brow. for every child I've never had.

Define wrong. Define us.

And then maybe you can tell me the difference.

Adam had it easy when his rib was taken to make. It was eve who suffered knowing she was stolen from him.

Define wrong she whispered. The glee of hallucinogens just beginning to subside. Peeling away the skins from the fruit. Cleaning up the juices they'd spilled. In the threat of ripening. In the plunge of harvests too ready to dig holes.

Tell me, what is happienss. Words on paper. Alcoholics remembering when they were poets. Devils dressed as angels. In heavens lit with blood. Pillows perfumed with semen. Their eager cocks ripping open zippers I never knew were there. The spill of moments. Like ink combusting out of the pen. In the brief lies we assume were us. In the docile creak of the bed laboring to define how close we were.

to heaven.

to anything we thought we wanted.

to remembering. to forgetting.

Define wrong. She said to herself. Wishing he could answer her question.

Or that she had never asked.

You can't carry your basket like that. With so many holes. You can gather. But you can't keep it.

She matched him piss for piss. Words a membrane to facilitate the change from conversation to intercourse. The whisper of raindrops like zippers coming undone. Belt buckles trembling to the quiver of her grip. On stern handles made of newness. In aluminum bedrooms wrinkled before we had even begun. I counted the every drop of urine. Those tiny prayers we blink to gods that can only see us when we're undressed.

In drawings of people. Where the curves overlap. Scribbles really. Arms defaulted to a curl. Legs swelling hard from an awkward scrawl of abdomen. An abandoned beehive rancid with honey.

What did I do then that I don't do now to negotiate the boredom gracefully?

Piss for piss they raced. Two hares without a tortoise. Winning. Always winning. Beating each other. Finding the creases. Pulling the shapes from fragile sheets of skin.

Every face empty paper. Every touch urine.

Wasted.

The architect on steroids. Confessions of a liar. The copyright of skin. Leaving us with nothing to say to each other. Little dolls with frozen elbows trying to wave goodbye to wolves.

I don't drink. I just try to remember. That seldom pinnochio. With strings made of skin. I don't say it out loud, but I always think it. That addiction is just a euphemism for hate. Just one more piece of shit left in the outhouse we sometimes say is love.

The worse the smell the more I am inclined to investigate. The source. The fouler that it gets. The more certain I am that we are closer to to heaven.

We're all in the same shit parade. But only a very few of us enjoy the smell.

When it rains. When I start to answer questions they've never asked. I begin to think of sex. One grand explosion of pleasure. And then we die. Or are put out like a used up cigarette. Sucked dry of all the disease inside us. Sad because they've gotten over our infection. Or were always immune to it.

When there's time. If there ever is. I'll explain. How this tide escaped the pull of the moon. How to properly love someone who's never loved you.

Broken needles in the fake fur on the arm of the teddy bear. The only drug hopelessness. Torn pantyhose concealing the scars on the legs of the bed. Memory painting my naked toes in the semen of used condoms.

When it rains. When people celebrate who they think they've become. I bite my nails. Teeth like a machine gun. And try to convince myself It's true. That the louder they say it the less true it is.

In the aftermath of these fireworks there is an independence. But not the kind I wanted.

I could tell some stories were I so inclined. Vomiting imagery at every comma. The only stories there really are of people dousing each other in lighter fluid. Tormenting dead lovers a with the spittle of sparks. There are an encyclopedia of characters in every sip of the drug. The less they do the more interesting their stories are.

Sunburned beds peeling away the prostitutes of loneliness. In wet hundred dollar bills. In wallets lost. And stolen. From husbands. Fathers. Friends.

They wake me up and ask me to tell them the stories I've only ever shared with the pillow. They set the alarm and pretend nothing's in the oven.

I have the stories. And the words give in. The sizzle of fresh fat in the frying pan as I fret the greasy knob. Numb to the temperature of forgiveness. The meat in the oven drawing its fractures in winces of melted butter. Blackboard thighs and chalk penises. Draw our lessons in bouts of arithmetic. The moment subtracts. The lie adds. The story tells itself in staunch equations that sober the thickest skins.

Evil drives a red cadillac.

Love a beat up old mustang.

It's the passengers you have to watch out for. Eager eyes through foiled glass. Their stare aspirin and vodka. In punch bowls made of words. Their breath prozac and anphetamines. In stomachs lined with addiction.

Love smiles big onion skin teeth. Garlic lips. A pungent confidence that is lost on the starved.

Evil divines a salad from her pantyhose. A sweet dressing from her sniffles. Her touch is the appetizer. Her thighs the main course.

Evil marinates with vinegar. Love seasons with salt. Meat is cooked. Blood is dripped. No one is fed.

Everything is eaten.

I'm not often honest with myself when I write. There are hints. Grunts of menopause in the drippings of imaginary abortions. They're not dead children if we never conceived them. But inside a woman is the one place the unborn can live. That hole we carry with us everywhere we go whispering like heroin. A needle teasing a deaf vein with the sound of music.

I can't hear it, but it assures me I already have. The broken pencil cutting the paper into shreds of skin. The confetti of women he calls his paradde.

You can't tell me I've cut my hair right. Or that my clothes fit. Because everything is wrong. I become this hole I carry with me. I am this emptiness you won't fill. Not because you can't. You just don't know or are afraid to go deep enough.

Sex turns us into these monsters we can understand. The hungry appartus of flesh. But sometimes. Too often. It forgets to turn us back into people after it's done.

I hate everything I've written. Mostly because it is mine. I hate the curls in my hair and the green in my eyes. I despise the music I want to hear and the way the smoke from my cigarettes accuses me to write. In furtive gulps of god's watered down kisses I create a memory of a life that never existed.

With the help of my Cain my Abel draws a perfect portrait of things we've never seen. With a sewer on my tongue and a landfill in my stomach I torment the silence with words I've never spoken. Each moment measured in sips. In how long it takes to compose the next paragraph. Rid my thoughts of that fiction they injected me with.

A quivering dartboard of questions. Answers piercing. Sticking rough into the soft. A smile of blood from between her legs. As she shifts her buttocks to let him enter her again. Act as the plunger to keep the emptiness from escaping.

The three bears. The big bad wolf. The hare. All the villains are here. To judge a pageant of victims. Beautiful criminals of the another sort. Chewed. Digested and shit out as something else. Stories she would tell herself. In the middle of drinking. In the judgement between sobriety and sleep. Words she could manipulate to change how she grieved for them. How she organized her grief. Into rigid compartments. Brief addictions to each person that had led to one long term relationship with her own loneliness.

She saw it as a kind of poverty. A form of working poorness. Everything she'd earned handed back to the struggle. A false insurance policy that denied her need for care.

She drew in pen. On the backs of papers she'd not read. Advertisements sent to some thriving person they presumed inhabited her world. She wrote letters. A cacophony of metaphors she never sent. Little doses of a cure she knew was looking for her. As she continued her flirtations with the disease.

She was still the same person. And a different one. There is change in repetition. The freedom of addiction making everything clear. It's splendid to be hopeless.

The villains are always on hand. The victims always ready to fail. Life is a fairy tale. Because just when you've rebuilt it, there's always someone there to blow your house down.