Knowing the window was enough. Gentle bombs. The calm of catastrophe in pajamas too big for her. Each pillow a novel she wished she could write. Each bottle a suicide she'd fucked up.

The night like a Christmas tree. All lit up with nothing underneath. Things I never wanted. Tombstones in mirror making them alive again. The ladder's still there. I'm still standing on it. Trying to decide.

Whether I'm going down or up.

Meticulous vultures clean the meat away, but leave the bones intact. And I am the perfect cadaver. Coffin on my hip. Eager to discharge. The real autopsies of broken hearts.

They're dead.

Does it matter why?

I've been born before. Fits of lactose curdling to the scope of human. Sex in sour curds. The liquid left. Expecting me to drown in it.

I've been born before. and died just as much. long dresses in manias of sequin assuming i had already worn them. tall shoes balancing me. In fits of womanhood. stilted dowries draw them into my bed.

To draw our art with broken pencils. To write our words with empty pens. It's there.

Even if no one can see.

We were leaving. In little gulps. A rooster in the middle of every nap. We were leaving together. Going somewhere alone. In little sips of big drinks. In nervous parades of skin we marched with gummy bear toes. With saltwater taffy shin. I waited for the first bite of too far. Prepared to limp the rest of the way. The long stretch of clarity that these thick, sweet lies thin. Sticky moats of obsession still my size. Ready to be tried on.

Worn stuffed animals dilineate soft margins. Smiles sewn in to still faces. Unblinking eyes turn worry to pills. I take them each in varied succession. Sex a calm vaccine against love Painted plastic eyes. Sewn lips. Frozen finger and toes. The dolls try to speak of their paralysis. How unfortunate they're unable.

He used to send me living flowers. Now they're all dead.

So many colors that never bred.

It's the distance between picking the place and going there that always gets in the way. Open bottles sifting through the debris of various moments. At soft angles. Gentle enough so that I can't smell. Decision disappearing into alcohol. Choices made long ago. Threaded through my skin in sloppy stitches. Holding together holes that still haven't closed.

The hour in its denim. Thick with daredevils. Speeding up as I approach the gap between their words and their actions. Intentions flying like darts at a bar. Tiny torpedoes launched by humbled hands. Cold contests of submission decide whom we'll want.

Shy bulls eyes get lost in thick walls. In a nest of choices. Empty since. Friendship took over this skin. The passive restraints alcohol and email. Little gods with big heads. Making the letters hard. Making the words a villain.

But it only takes another drink to find them. Lost balloon floating away toward the sun. As light as it was. I still lost my grip. As far away as it floats. I can still see it. All the clouds are too ready to shift. To let me watch it disappear.

They found a void in our universe. A giant void. And now I'm always asking myself if I am it.

In the cold dreams of morning. Sour stockings over her head. Tepid bras clenching her breasts. She ticks. A bony stopwatch flirting with the speed of decision. I am here. And there. And every place I've ever been. In suspenders of skin stretched taut to elevate sagging hearts.

It's not like I wake up thinking this is day [insert number here] of my life. Multiply. Carry the one. X over N. I'm in my Z percent. It's not as though I fall asleep wondering when [insert wish here] will happen. I don't wish. I don't wonder. I just am. As alive as anyone can claim. The proof in their laugh. You don't have to be happy to find something funny, but you do have to have lived enough to know when something is.

I'll wake up early now and then. My thoughts bleeding calendars. Dates I can't picture in any way except faces. The chloroform smell of seldom of lovers. That make the darkness worth exploring.

Even when waking up means loosing them.

Even when I have to assume there is a god and he's amusing himself at my expense. It helps to be an atheist then. It helps to imagine all those gods in their underwear. that is. If that sight isn't too grotesque.

It helps to remember Eve when you want to taste the apple. God's hasty bi-product of first man. Original solicitor of temptation.

Woman.

Only reason there is heaven.

Only reason there is hell.

Woman.

Only reason Adam didn't hang himself.

I know you're listening god(s), because I can hear you breathing. I just don't know who you are.

Dobermans of discourse bark stout. Collared, but without muzzle. Aren't we there? Or near enough to know. If the home is heart. My children all in words. My offspring in black ink. Rabid as ever. No vaccine strong enough. To stop the virus already begun.

I can count the stitches in their frown. Atoms misbehaving as I try on those old close (clothes).

They still fit, but they never will. Truncated zippers pose the moment. To take pictures we'll never see. To name lies we'll never reveal. To differentiate the poet from the person.

In spots on the lens. In the aptitudes of small men. The thin nightgowns that turn sex to sleep waiting for approval. The purpose of lies. Clearer than it's ever been.

The meaning of life right there in the sacks that carry it. I'd never have been a poet had it not ended. I'd never have become a woman had it lasted.

You're mine. If such a thing could be.

You love me in every way that means nothing.

in soft cankers the word prevails. sore lips practice in front of the mirror. home enough for anyone. or myself at least. the smooth dungeons habits build. creaking staircases down to cellars forgot. kept in jewels not rare enough to envy. Nor dark enough to fear.

Toiling in the collapse. The velvet of demons poised for orgasm. Wide smiles deciding which side they're on.

In dreams interrupted. Daggers of sun pierce the sheets. And I wake up the same as I went to sleep. Sober enough to remember. Drunk enough to forget.

The downpour of drugs that turn hysteria into happiness. If I wait long enough. The lesson of a bed that isn't empty.

Yet.

The names we give to the over. Dolls without their dresses. Plastic toes.

Empty dresses. Grim with the prospect of touch. Empty shoes. Discarding.

The toes we've left in them.

The hair on his chest wasn't enough that you'd notice, but he knew it was there. And always left his shirt open in the hope that someone would see. The tiny snakes emanating from his skin. And assume there still was venom in those rotted fangs. Or at least be charmed enough to pretend that they'd been poisoned.

By him.

In sculptures of touch. Balls of clay still wet in her nervous grip. The kiln coughing hot in the background. As the wheel spun the would be shape through the twitch of her fingers. In an tentative chorus of skin. Eager to be hardened.

She thought for a while. As one drink become several. And her art dried tight to her flesh. The lopsided bowl she'd spun still soft between her legs. As she contemplated whether or not she had succeeded.

In creating something.

She turned the window inside out. And found. An eternity of eyes that had never seen anything. A pergotory of stares dissolving in a pan too hot. The drip of the naked glass so much louder than she had imagined it would be. As it seeped out of its clothes. Drop by drop. Sips of beer like onion skin carelessly tracing my thought. In fragments of punctuation. In epiphanies that can't recall. What I learned from them.

Little pats of butter melted. Turning brown. In pans gotten too hot.

In bit of breakfasts I can't recall. Men toasted. Warm. And half way down my throat. Before I knew I was choking.

And when it was too late. I was glad.

To find an end.

I listen to the rain in brutal reprises. I wear the footsteps that make up the mountain. They're always falling down. Like I am. The room pivots. About the axis in his exit. Plastic army men cup together to diffuse the bomb. That's yet to hit.

Sobered by the prospect.

Of remembering death.

The short sleeves of lovers. The tank tops of sex. Sewing buttons to the heads of broken zippers. The solvency of pants. Not withstanding. Lipstick's auger. I open my pants with a question mark. I let my legs part. Only to stall on your answer.

I'd have thought naked was solution enough to determine which sun to orbit. And we could fall from there. Planets depending on each other not to drift.. In the shrug of gravities overlooked. The chirp of worlds caving in. Space enough to disappear. Opportunities to be forgotten overlooked.

Galaxies exed out. In a concession of physics. Matter approving the science of surrender. What remains. Still puzzle enough. To prove. What I've always known.

The tall boots we put on to touch them go away when they do.

When the forest burns down. We build ontop of it. It never comes back.

You're wrong. I am different

It's you who is flawed if you can't see.

The threads over the holes in my socks.

Can't hear the hiccup of running feet.

Maybe you're deaf. Maybe you're blind.

It doesn't matter.

I know. You'll never hear. Never see.

Don't want to.

It's not our hunger that's to blame as we starve. but we still hate it.

I'm there. In long shorts. In the camouflage of spoiled hearts. Blurs of decision filtering through the words. In a logic puzzle of I can't count. Bottles like limbs negotiating the traumas of touch. Little explosions that kill so much.

Swimming through the appetites of people. Disguise by disguise. Tossed into the mask they've discarded. Confined by the roles they've been assigned.

He walks into my life in only his underwear. Leaving fully dressed.

And I know the flaw must be within me. But still. It could be anywhere.

There are so many holes in this bucket. I could've spilled so much anywhere.

Find the puddles. Find the mess. And that is where I must've fallen. Where I can be recovered.

Only half a bottle left. But more than that to tell. The paradox of the poet. Of the addict. Of the person left to launder on the rope in their tug of war. Stiff skin. Bellows against the breeze. Lingers over the mud in the middle. Of a pulling contest only alone ever wins.

No paragraph short enough to dissuade this scavenger from picking at what's left of the carcass. It's already dead. And my shame dissolved. In fractions of skin. Melting soft on the bills of the vultures. I can't blame anyone. I can't learn from what I've done wrong. Because I'm wrong even if I start again. I'm lost even if I find myself. Because it's all middle. And I'm there in it. Not knowing what to touch.

Sanctuary can only lead two places. Happiness or hopelessness. Depending on where you've come from.

Counting the fat on my shins. Spaces between each bone. Until I reach my middle. And then I know. How to draw the map. Between myself and them. And then their lies have character. If you can count that high.

With hands made of riddles. Tepid dramas debate us. In the filthy rhetoric we wear as faces. In the musty burlap we call skin. Culling the wine from sour grapes. And beds made of words never said. Vampires in the keyboard lapping at sex spilled. Politicians in the text. Making all these masks meaningless.

I remember the first. Frail. Useless muse. Words approaching. Blurred and still in makeup. Staging the pieces in little losses. Framing the surrender in fireworks.

The second. Overconfident. Bitter candies in a beautiful box. The luster of ribbons knotted across the seams of the heart. Shaky letters in cursive still too young. To finish sentences greater than my obsession.

Looking out in shy resolves. A gentle warfare with the self. Like sleep only louder. I'm better. I'm worse. I'm everything I want to be.

And nothing.

The third. Musty curtains begin to part. Revealing a stage where a dialogue is being born. Cigarettes burn to quickly. Clothes fall off. Wrinkled fetuses elope with the world. In hemorrhages of sobriety.

Looking back in thinning gloves. A fingertip to the clock. Every second an upper cut. Every lover a boxing matching. If only I could be young again. I'd know better than to love anyone. If only I could go back. I'd know better than to wear bras so tightly.

The fourth. The epiphany in blurry scores. Some refrain of music I can't recognize. The last. The god in a mortals smile. Fouled by such red teeth.

The instruments of our distaster all around me. And still I can't hear the music I know is there.

The pretty in the addiction. The deity impersonating the man. One drink at a time. In the rquake of small step ladders. That make small men tall.

Everything si not enough. Everything isn't even close to what I want.

The heavy halos of certain angels more than I can lift. The panic of happiness overdosing right there on my doorstep.

I'm woken up. By ladders. And sirens. Frenzied in a fraudulent euphoria. I'm woken up. By missing tiles. By dirty guns. By bullets lodged in heads.

I'm sober. Promiscoulsly so. Teasing the coffins that wait on my eulogy. Reasoning with my pain. I'm drunk. A prude alcoholic. Flirting with obession. But never letting it part my legs.

In every word. In every keystroke. The bold face of underwear removed. Lazy thunderstorms rumble on our decisions. IN the twist of vision that makes my eyes fit again. So I can see. from this far away what I'd only seen up close before.

The Callous. In brown words. Sucking up all the feeling. Stealing the music in a stiff gown.

Where nothing echoed.

A fists laid open. A laugh of concrete. Muttering jokes. As it wonders how to hold.

This fist everywhere. This fist lost in everything I do.

The bed growls. Hungry jackals survey the scabs. As the darkness grows over the holes we've made in this bed. The bits of skin we call scabs musing on the villains of a stoic fairy tale.

Were I a princess. Then. They'd all kneel down. Waste their kisses on trying to wake me up. Were I a monster. Then. They'd fight that much harder. The fables of every reality may differ. But the moral remains the same. I wear this sword from groin to tongue. While the dragons fight amongst themselves.

Until every battle is an afterthought. And every love has been and gone. Talcum powder still in the air long after the rash is solved. Making it harder to breathe than was promised. Coloring all that skin I had hoped I'd lost.

The night tries but never can. Perpetuate the change. I pull at the staples that hold those pages close. I drown the deserts in tears. And still nothing grows there.

I beat my drum. As loud as I can. But still. No one moves.

And the rabbit was cold. For so long as the clock sprinted and schooled outside of its orbit. the rabbit. The rabbit. With ears cut of glass. mirrors in all it heard.

Paws. Paws. everywhere. Bigger than the footprints I document. Broken maps. roads drawn in dull claw. The distance humming like busy ants underfoot. The journey. Queens without kings. Drowning in their larva. A sea of offspring erase her from her kingdom. An insect. A judgement. An atlas. In the blink of her happiness. As it focuses on itself again.

The rabbit. The rabbit. In spasms of calculus. Counts the twitches of his nose. The exponential crisis brewing between his lips. Writing with dirty ears. Too tall to hear. A tender tail recalls. Atoms undisturbed until.

The carrot tenses. To run. To paint the world full with moments he'll almost taste. The carrot turns. Boasting the paradox of getting what you want. A fraudulent catharsis tapping at the glass. worlds not unlike our own we only assume must exist.

places we've only visited stroking like we lived there. rabbits on one leg. still hobbling to win the race.

We win.

and we lose.

Every Day.

I'm not about suicide. The stoic screech of words across the chalkboard in our beds. There's happiness in every vomit or orgasm. The stench of beer counting out loud. The levels on the elevator between then and now.

There's very little darkness in so much seeing what I have.

There's no dismantling the beauty to find its origins. No artist to praise for the creation. Just eyes all about. Rogue penises in a blizzard of men. Assuming they've earned what they've can't even afford to borrow.

In the curve of her blouse. Too cheap for her form. In the drape of her breasts. Little grins at the middle of her ribs. As her bra surrenders. In the footprints of her panties. Their hands. Like a war she's conceded she cannot win.

Uninterested in battles. Or the armies of strangers that sex proposes. It's only suicide if you let them know you. It's only suicide if you believe they're better than you.

The drama. The drunken polaroids. The weak venom of dying snakes. The drawers I left open. Fractions of clothes I couldn't wear.

In the spoil of her pants as she calculates the cost of independence.

As many reasons as she can find to die still she looks for one to live.

It's not suicide until you wish it had never happened. It's not sex until you wake up without them.

I'm not dying.

I'm not dying.

Not yet.

It's not suicide if your skin is still there after they've left.

I do want to know how I can change. Daub the nail polish on the runs in those panty hose. Hiding what's left of the bruises on my legs.

Bent over the toilet. Removing the tampons from my head. Bloated. Abundant with the crimson mucous of a life unresolved. My thoughts still menstruating in thick clumps. I put someone inside to plug up the hole. But they're only sieves.

Straining the pulp from the liquid. Sucking the woman out of the child. Stale on a bed she's never slept in.

Opening doors. Answering calls. With the apathy of an artist. Drawing islands in oceans of skin. Arguing with the braids in her hair. Using up the last of her coloring books on people she couldn't draw.

If there's anything to the rumble of the walls. That black abyss between then and now. Anything I've yet to hear. Say it soon. Or don't say it at all.

I do want to pick the flowers. Smell their perfume through the allergens wedged up my ass. Flirting with the truth in the small print of testosterone encyclopedias. Tracing the images they draw upon my flesh. In soft crayons made of beer. In bridges as weak as my resolve. The softer stars melt down from the sky. Frosting on stale cakes. The usual catharsis of bored demons. They're tired of me.

I love what I can see. Meteors and puppies dogs. I love what loves me. Nothing at all.

I love the words that dare to reveal how alone we are. I love that they're gone, but haven't forgotten.

How alone we are.

I'm gone to sleep long ago. But they still wake me up sometimes.

I once was a sad child. Loose in her clothes. Lost in her gift. The ventriloquist for a hollow woman. I slid inside her wooden flesh and tried to imagine how the puppet might live.

Soft men poking around inside a torso too rigid. Hungry mosquitoes stinging only callouses. Fooled by the softness of her vagina into believing that penetration had begun.

The blood on the rim of her underwear. Smiling so new. The density in her goodbye. A wrecking ball at the back of her throat. In stitches of skin that had put her over budget.

As ready to be loved as any child has ever wished.

I was going through the letters. Frail sign language of empty hands. Loose elastic at the ankles of the metaphor. In tight braids the sex occurred. Without apology. In rented tuxedos it slowed danced. To the songs I hate that get stuck in my head even so.

I'll say it's because no one listens. He'll say it's that no one says. What they're thinking. No one can hear you if you're afraid to say.

There in the time travel of our hearts the contracts are signed. Ghosts remit their payments. To the mortgage dubbed life.

The walls barked their shadows. On long leashes made of orgasm. The windows put on their clothes. Slowly. In tiny hiccups of underwear. Soliciting an invitation. To get rained on again.

Tiny footprints leave us lost. The big ones we get stuck in.

Nothing ever looked so small as we did then. The phone in the corner of the room positing dead conversations into my thoughts. The eyes of the bed darting to avoid the sight of our naked asses. As we groaned and greased our way to happiness. In dubious epiphanies. In trenchcoats resmebling sex. The shallow of emotion revealing itself in sneezes of skin.

Colors in the voices I've outlined. Becoming clear.

We draw ourselves in pencil. We search for the ink. Labelling every encounter. By the distance it creates between the past and the future. Lost in there.

Have you every heard. The sound of waiting. Have you ever found the empty cradle.

and wondered how you'd ever sleep again.

iamalone

aiamolen

jbnbmpof

enolamai

9 1 13 1 12 15 14 5

Everything I want is inside this notebook. Inside the choke of this glass. Everything I want is another lesson in letting go.

A perfect lie. A grand addiction in rainbow colored suspenders. Haughty clowns in flagrant baths of liquor. Judge the seldom beauty contest of everyday women. A bit of panty on their fingertips. A hint of tit in each score. An apt bouquet of miscarriage in every winner.

In the ugly. In the foul of former lovers. The sheets keep track. Hours measured in wrinkles. Years carved into pillows. All the drawings we name because we want to know what they'll never tell us. All the journals I've filled with revelations that lie to us. Sad demons chewing on the last of our coma. Little towns in masturbations kept. Open bridges stalled. Like the smiles sewn onto doll faces. Only letting the biggest pass through.

When I can't hear I really can't hear at all. Deaf with the sound of sober as it tosses those coins for me to call. Gambled by the skin I wear. My life maneuvering around me like some abortion gone wrong.

The triumph of saviors still bristling in my thoughts. Ingrown hair growing both in and out of my heart.

I can see the people. Recognize them. And I know the places. Am sure I've been there before.

Like rungs on an old ladder. Each step breaking under my climb. They try, but can't take me anywhere.

We jerk our offs. We stumble our spits. With cactus lips. With rubber arms. Poseable nightmares in stranger's beds. A Halloween of sex. Lovers in all manner of disguises. Knocking on every door. Following a soft trail or porch lights in search of a demon I once met.

Some perfect Hannibal to coax my lambs out of silence. Or the rubber face of a rogue clown to hide this beast of a grin. As though we were never ourselves. Born only at the moment we realize this. A lazy tornado of stockinged legs shooting out from her torso like far away lightning bolts. Igniting a fire too far away to put out. Charming a flame too distant to burn us.

Flirting with the riddle in the words that are frugal to my insanity. Adjusting the volume of their microphone to accommodate the mistakes I've made. Replicating the colors of knowing. One word at a time.

As if it mattered what I did.

Out in the open. Dug up skin. Red smiles under fingernails. The smell of piss on poached lips. The moon sobbing on the windshield. The darkness heaving as it pushed another morning out from between its legs.

Sometimes after the sex was sleep enough. To shrink into my corner of the bed and scrub the words until every sentence was missing skin. Scratching the eyes from the paper until every page was as blind as I was. Sometimes orgasm made me love them. Other times it made me wonder if I ever could. Like any super hero. The cape was not enough to convince.

I'd tell the words what to say, but they wouldn't always listen.

I mean, I wanted to be young, but not that young. Coutning the washes of sheets between. Naming each vulture overhead. Diving into deep pools. Only to surface in puddles. I wasn't surprised. Only just disappointed.

Waking up to less than nothing.

I'd tell the night what I was thinking, but the morning never wanted to remember.

Taking off her nightgown to reveal she'd forgone her underwear. Measuring his love in jabs of latex.

Close enough to happiness to know this wasn't it.

He grows sad for me when too much time has passed and no one's answered my riddles. There is no answer. Only listening.

Warring with his words to chisel out a fitting eulogy. To the girl who dies on his doorstep night after night. Blind words oblivious to the glass between art and life. Or else refusing to see.

What's to say. That I haven't already. There's the bottle in my fist. A boxing glove's worth of epiphanies spilling from my broken smile. Measured in the time it takes to snuff out that last cigarette.

To some it's just madness. Some grave spectacle to entertain. To others it's an art. Inverting each moment until all thoughts lay inside out. The bickering wisdoms of pillows at their prom. In love with every bed that isn't already occupied.

To me it's just life. Dying. Word for word. Indulging the whims of the ghosts that make it worthwhile.

The eager. Diamond fisted, big titted itch. The truth. Schizophrenic, dirty chinned gigolo. The river. A tsunami erupting from her thighs. In a catastrophe of woman. Killing everything and nothing. One dick at a time.

The calm of paupers. Warm as a the coax of lipstick to a drugstore queen. Owning nothing but the color of their kiss on someone else's underwear. The bite of zippers beating out a parade of lyrics she can't recall.

Like when. she knew the fashions of all her captors.

Or how. she could recognize them in any disguise.

Of if. They've changed since then.

And why. the names she calls them by don't mean anything anymore.

There were plenty of moments. Thin rimmed spectacles flat lining on our faces. There were drunken operas with sex chasers. And all the various ways pores divine their peeks at heaven. Lust is a cruel accurate microscope. If your eyes chance to open.

Memory is a flawed time machine. Too far back I'm always taken. The past in a vast array of pieces. And only one solution. I try. To solve it in doses of disease. I try. To solve it in the same way it was created.

There will always be moments. Targets salivating their arrows. As the apple clings hopelessly to the top of my head. Smiling smart like all victims must. When they know the accuracy of the shooter.

I can wear the limp in smaller fragments. Like my cripple is a coloring book of lines I've yet to whole. I can spoil the wishing well with my spit. Ruining it for everyone else. And I would. If i thought they'd notice.

I'd have said right by now if I could. The songs are there because we want to hear them. The night is dark because we don't want to see.

Those plastic lips we thought were real. Those bowls of red we mistook for sex. In parodies of skin we used to take for granted. Those toys we beat assuming nothing could break them.