Enough to spill. Spill a little bit. And no more. That'll do. A tantrum of skin embezzles my attention. Every encounter is a sudden accident. Each kiss is whiplash. I search for my head amongst the debris. But when I finally find it I decide I was better off before I did. Happiness is the seat belt. Sex is the windshield. And we were hoping to crash.

I like my wounds to be vocal. I like my bandages caked with blood. Brittle and sewn to the scab. Muddy watercolors of the last time I felt anyone. I like infection. The itch too deep to scratch.

I was driving. Steering with my eyes. Seeing with my hands. As lovers demand of their victims. As touch requires of its students. I wanted to learn. I wanted to know. What the world had been keeping from me. What drugs there were to make life bearable. How many flavors of people they came in. I wanted to know.

I could tell the story whenever I wanted, but I had only that one chance to live it.

Such is the quality of love. It grows too slowly and lust is so impatient. No time to wait for the paint to dry on the colors we thought we wanted when there are so many blank walls I've yet to test.

I'm better off with bare wood anyway.

The splinters are perfect lovers. Gentle enough. In comparisons like dog tracks. Corsets of men. Shaping my bones to fit other women's bodies. The world is always unprepared for the beautiful. Shocked at the slightest hint of compassion. The world doesn't want to make friends. It just wants people. Lots of people. To displace its emptiness. And people are the same.

No paper. Just words without anywhere to go.

Coaxing the princes. With promises of sex. As all princes must be convinced. The ave the beauty. Or what passes for it.

Numbering her strangers by the shapes of their penises. Little girls tracing their men with worn out crayons. Little girls pretending they know what they're doing. Little women denying they're old enough to answer for what they've done.

Life is a true or false question. And I'm always wrong.

You pour the water. Thirst your only motivation. Lost in the tension on the molecules. That something so small could decide for us.

I don't know what I have left to want. I just know that it's still waiting for me to decide.

I don't know what life is or why is tries so hard to convince us. I just know that it's less likely to spill over the closer that it get to the top.

She's not a princess. Will never be one. But she hasn't forgotten her princes.

Remembering the moment. Pale paint drying on thin brushes. The cartoon in your fall. Looking down at the nothing beneath your feet. Not falling until you see it. Me. Passing this anvil onto you. The words above your head so clear.

She draws in pen. She draws in ink. Pencil is for the young. Pencil is for those that still think that they can erase. Or that they would want to. She draws in circles. The beginning is the end. Like she remembers her nightmares. Like she knows her life is.

Fretting her skin. Like used sleeping pills. Waking up in strange beds. Counting the men like raindrops. The heavens sweating down on her as she hurries to keep up with them.

No more dead things. Just the soil between her toes as she catches the last petal of the last flower. No more gardens. Just the dead coming back again. Until all gods are liars.

She was arguing with her uterus about the science of the heart. Every dead egg she'd pissed into the toilet throughout her life was her evidence. A perfect hysteria womanhood kept mute for over thirty years. Love is simply the survival of the species. Not a device for individual happiness. Just a tool of nature to keep itself alive.

She was cold. As they tread there in open water of her thoughts. She listened quietly as her uterus spoke in tortured clenches about a world it wished to be a part of.

Love is pure Darwin. The heart is a means to an end. Love is science divided until only flesh is left. The science of the heart is right there inside of us. Life making itself inside me. Me spitting it out.

It's the only benefit of being human. That I can overule the science inside me.

Guilty with the dead spider on the bottom of her shoe. A run in her mood unstoppable. Where's the giant hand to flatten her she asked to the song she wasn't listening to anymore. Same ugly music she always assumes belongs to her. Like pleasure belongs to rich, dirty old men. And hopelessness only to the desperately young.

Where's the exit to the maze the walls asked in a snit of left over woman syrup. Changing herself she thought of babies and geriatrics. How prevalent the diaper is in all stages of a female life. How soiled her underwear was from the night before. The dead roses that swell in and then pour from her gut until it's empty for another little while. The garden under her skin. Below her bones. Manic with reasons she wants no part of. Foul with the sweat of a happiness she imagines other people must find in all the things she tries not to want.

She likes to sleep for as long as she can. She tries her hardest to never wake up again. But her body always betrays her. Still much healthier than she has done to it. Still much younger than she remembers of having lived in it.

They'll say you're not special. And you probably aren't. They'll say that skirt would look better a little higher. And maybe it would, but it's not for them to decide. She'll wear the time like a bracelet. Too loose around her wrist. It'll fall off. She'll be glad when it does.

That it's gone. And she doesn't have to wear those high heel anymore. Make so many apologies she doesn't mean. Or ever wear again those dresses they've picked out for her.

Throwing away the dimes that the dollars left her. The dirt wants to say she's short-sighted, but it's heavy from so much rain. She shrugs it on like she tends to all that mud. Thin skeletons dance on her skin. Tangoes. Paso Dobles. And people. Like earnest beauty pageants. Pretend they can dance on their crutches.

I'm not your manic depressive Jesus. I'm not the pawn that takes the queen. I lose. Because I want to. Save yourself.

I'm not asking to be loved. I can do that on my own. Drawing on the sidewalk in bits of little girl. Like real artists do. Scooping the skin from hollow dresses. Naming the broken bones after arguments I've lost to myself.

He once told me there was no one he could love. I didn't believe him.

He just didn't want to.

All those doses. Take me back to when. Sober was all the time travel necessary to prove we were in love.

When you fuck a married man you find out how easy it is to lie to yourself. How easy. How awkward. How hard. It is. To believe anything they've told you.

How many ghosts you've soiled trying on the wrong skins.

When you write, in a manner such as this, those who happen to read tend to assume they are receiving a clear picture of you. Writing is just that. A creative outlet. One tiny flaw amplified until it fills the page.

I am not the alcoholic poet. She is just a cuticle on one finger of one hand. I am not broken nor lost. I'm just writing. Like no one's there.

There is no other way to write.

When you write, if you're good enough, you become the character. I guess I should be flattered that I've become her to such an extent that so many believe I'm her.

It's easy though, to become her.

The hard part is going back to being me.

We were selling self-esteem from the back of my mountain bike. It's just that the mountain we chose was too steep.

I had my cartoons all laid out. In wells of when. Or if. I would ever laugh at myself again. The sarcasm read what i had so far and decided to wait.

It's funny when it hurts. Those scorpions inside our shoes acting like people do. Making the venom so appealing. Making the sting into happiness.

Like I always do.

Always will.

Take off these gloves and feel the window for the first time. The glass you always thought was there.

Never was.

The world was always there.

If I'm different it's because everyone else is the same. Let go of the darts. The balloons will still break. No need for sex to disinfect the wound. The bacteria is bored with us.

I'm a cult. As right as I can convince you that I am. Tall fences grow from zombie soil. Short skirts tease tall boots in a circus of vagina. I'm a religion. Reason enough for the lost. Popsicle penises. Warm ice cream in a paper cup. Practicing their form from the edges of a plastic spoon.

If I knew them I don't anymore. If I ever lived it wasn't like this.

There are predators. And he imagined himself as one. Like straw houses imagine they won't be blown down.

I knew the alien. It was easier then. The tabloid of skin telling me to wait. Back when change was a luxury. And everything else could afford to wait on it.

On top of her sheets. A Disney cast between her thighs. Dialogue vomits from idle skin. Chunks of hours before coming up completely undigested.

Some would say she's shy. Most would. And they'd be correct. Every word she speaks is a debate. Every touch is a promise. Not to make too much of something so little.

She likes to think it's them, but she knows it's her.

On top of the sheets. Choosing at random princes and witches. Talking to the mirror. Wondering why it doesn't answer.

The ponytails on her backside wagging as she flaunts her infection. With a broad admiration for how she came to be this sick. She likes to say it's about recovery, but she knows it's about the sickness. All the men she can cut from this one if she folds him correctly.

She was never good with scissors, but this is easy.

The meat is cooked, but the skin is still raw.

close enough. the bulls eye of her stare ample target. for a broken trigger like us. i can make teddy bears from gun powder, but i can't stitch the wounds into bleeding less.

Sex is too much of a chastity belt for me. It's all just skin melting off their faces. Dominoes on acid. Falling down in spectacular spectacles.

The little bullets. Eruptions of people puncture the surface and wait to explode until they're well inside of us. Chewing on all those tiny shoes. Barbies dolls mutilated from the ankle down. Sorrow is a vicious attorney. Fretting over those Lego houses. Mowing plastic lawns. Walking pissless dogs. Life is a merciless jury. And peers are subjective.

The coroner pretends not to know. The mortician is already dead. It's not dying if it it takes this long. It's not a wall if there's no mortar between the bricks. It's just a a matter of waiting for everything to cave in. pretending the world isn't so far away.

It's not a nightmare if you can't wake up from it.

When I dream it's like real life. Only louder and with subtitles. I always wake up in the middle only to discover I haven't. The autumn of a life. All the leaves turning pretty colors right before they die.

The handcuffs in every woman's head as she undresses in front of a man for the first time. A thief. An artist. A victim. Drawing in borrowed ink. On stolen paper. Pictures taken without permission. Waking up. To the flashes in her esophagus. The shutter of strange eyes hijacking the lines of her hips.

They all want a fresh womb to crawl inside. Be born again as someone else's child.

Drawing the mazes in matching paint on the walls.

When we dream it's the same as life. Only redder. Tying their shoes afterwards. Crippled sideways men bent over the broken dam. They walk away the same as they walked in. Only more yellow. Counting the barbs on the stingers.

I always wake up sure the monsters are real.

If I ever do wake up.

i wasn't moving, but i was. Toads in the sky. Mimicking the rain that had already fallen. The cigarette burning down like a bomb about to detonate. Fingers and toes all tangled up in deciding where to die.

He's not ugly. Just doesn't know how beautiful he is. The dinosaurs in his underwear wait for the meteor. Imagine extinction. Like we all do. When life won't listen.

Temporary tattoos. Foul dimensions cycling through what is left of us. In the dots of blood on linen napkins. Pretentious mysteries too easily solved. No evidence necessary. No victims required.

To know what is dead.

Hunting dogs and rifles too certain. Playdough blow jobs stopped before the sculpture could heal. There should be proof, but there isn't. There should be a plague, but there's just us. Seeing god in every bit of skin we think belongs to us.

When all I want to prove is that I'm immune to it.

Some time travel that only makes sense in another world. The pantomime of strangers. A lazy dance. The feedback resonating from his zipper. Cocky songs that don't seem to care how he came to learn them. A cardboard sign stuck into his underwear. No trespassing. A template. For the only sickness that could cure us.

A man. In every sense of the word.

She's red Enough now.

To let the concrete decide how hard it will be.

Humiliated by the feast the wolf retreats. Amber paw prints slice through the glass between starvation and pride. Beads of moonlight like scurrying ants steal for themselves what we were too proud to eat.

We think we still have the cotillion. The belaboured gowns wasted on one night of thoughtless favor. Giving what can't be given back. Reaping girls into women with blunt machetes. Finding their future in fallen fruit.

Riding the frogs in stiff stirrups. Her hips artichokes. Waiting to be peeled. Her breasts homemade meatloaves. Naked without their mashed potatoes.

Her Ass in the clouds. Her head in their crotches.

Ready to swallow.

All fairy tales preempted. All pieces of glass stubbornly hanging onto the window.

More lard on the inferno. To caramelize the myopia. More mints on the pillow. To show how blind I am.

Taking her frailties like insulin injections. Stifling the disease to make it come back that much stronger. Eager as a tortoise. Blase as a hare. In fables she'd ostracized long ago. Critiques of weakness manufactured by a Zen of Camelots. She's as strong as she needs to be to pretend the truth is a metaphor. There's an Aesop in every orgasm. She thinks as she imagines what clothes they take off for other women.

There are so many lives she's almost lived. Like scenes cut from a movie. Scripts rewritten for happier endings. It's pastures frying under the slope of the sun. Too confident in our dependence.

Soft battles in hard wars. Big answers in little bottles.

She doesn't remember what they wore.

Watching movies. Autopsies on warm, fragrant flowers. The weather is my only alibi. It was too much summer to have been murder. Accidents happen. Not everything can live. In the ways we expect.

Eighty degrees and humid. Maybe August isn't done taking pictures of us. In the grass we forgot to cut. In the weeds we're too tired to pull again. I had the hacksaw. I finessed it through the meat of the afternoon and watched for the leaves to grow back.

I knew they would. Try again to turn the dying into love.

I stomped on the empty branches. Feebly skipping a rope only I could see. A ghost. Gods in costumes made of men. Fucking hard enough to make the world listen. To make that giant cure fit into that tiny hole. The newest hole he'd made in himself. A puddle of heroin like an angry stripper still vibrating at the fold in his arm.

More alive than he'd ever been.

I could never say. But I'll always know.

Why he left us.

The hideous smile in her crotch. Posing staunch for the artist in his pants. The vengeful child in her head. Rubbing the leaves into the concrete. Portraits of life drawn with the dead.

The act driven by strangers' pretty hatred. They don't sing. They blame. And accuse her. Of things too true.

When it gets dark she scolds herself in breaths of cigarette smoke. When she gets lonely she thanks her demons for their generosity.

Not here. In this graveyard we eulogize as touch. Not now. All these tears we have no explanation for except that we don't understand what it is we've lost.

I just know some thing's gone. I'm not gone from it, but it is gone from me. Jagged lipstick pouring its code upon her grin. Words like mosquito bites scratched into her face.

The itch of submission. Paints itself under her nails.

There's nothing to change except herself.

I'm talking to them. Just not in ways they can't hear. Jesus pudding is chocolate. Satan is vanilla. Love is neopolitan. Both of them and something else.

The end is caramel. Burnt sugar. Sweeter than it's ever been. I'm only condoning suicide if it's the best the solution. Like in most cases. Most people. Bipolar clown faces drawn over the actual ones.

The exaggerated outlines I call lovers turning my fear into art. A palette knife always under her tongue. Ready to caox the mountains from the flood. The canvas between her legs still as blank as the first time she opened them.

Perdition only makes sense when you believe in redemption. Otherwise it's just masturbating until it hurts.

I'm not a clown, but I know how to wear the makeup. I'm not god, but I know what he's thinking.

Fucking beer always talking like it knows me. Sour eyelashes batting at balls that aren't there. Castrating the female one tit at a time. In sober annihliations. Sometimes. Often. Habits. Vaccines of sex spoil the meat inside. Nothing to eat.

No supper for stray dogs. Nor the claw marks they've left on the door front.

Clowns in tight pants. Not so funny. Acrobats with greasy hands. Catch the fall with open fists. Long overdue dinners. Meat everywhere. Dark enough.

The spirit. The wince of the jaw as it clenches to swallow that first taste. A cloudy marinade of sour loves choking on the flame.

I listen for a cough from the darkness. Some way to know this night is over. The salt and vinegar in the flesh of men that make everything taste bitter.

I don't know.

Maybe it always did.

What's weird to me is that when people have children they don't consider the ramifications. You're not just having your own child. You're having a child for the whole world. The whole of this overcrowded stone we call home.

Thirty years ago when my family came down from NY to south jersey it was a barren wasteland. Now, it's an overcrowded city. Up from under ten thousand to approaching ninety thousand residents.

When you have children it doesn't just impact you. It has an effect on the entirety of the planet. The times of being selfish and having as many babies as it takes to fill the void in your life are gone. Get over it. You can have a hundred babies. You'll still be empty inside. Spare the rest of us.

There's nowhere left to put all these people. Overcrowding fertilizes violence and hatred.

And what's even stranger is all these people having babies don't even consider the state of the planet. Global warming. The failure of recycling. Rising gas prices. It's like they don't care at all what is to become of the future. It only matters how their children can make them happy for the next ten to twelve years.

Where?! Tell me where do you want us to put all your children and grandchildren? Is everyone that fucking stupid or selfish that this notion never occurs to them. This warehouse is full. Until we can control the climate on Mars it's time to stop having children. For at least a few hundred years. People are basically useless anyway. They eat, sleep and shit. Any dog or cat can do that. So next time you feel the urge to procreate consider adopting some animal in a shelter instead. Their love will surely last longer. And you'll save on that whole college fund thing.

Maybe if we can stop fucking like bunnies long enough we'll lose the urge to keep killing each other just to ascertain a moment of peace.

And stop with the fertility drug assholes. Adopt. Isn't obvious. God doesn't want you to have your own children.

You can worship one or the other. Choose. Science or religion. Decide. And live with the consequence. I see no mention of fertility drugs in the bible. If you're barren, maybe there's a reason.

The pesticides in his semen never did kill the roaches inside her vagina. Besides. She was quite content with the infestation. Knowing she wasn't different anymore.

The darkness picked. Dead flowers in her painkillers misleading death again. Dirty pantyhose on the shower rod writing poetry with each drip.

Menstruating hearts wish to reproduce. Clone the happiness they know is leaving them. And so they do. One child at a time. They live again.

And there's nowhere left for us to go.

The smell of aces thick in a game of poker. The roar of dead angels in the pot I'm about to win.

I don't lose unless I want to.

I do believe in heaven. It's just that mine is real.

I see God in everything, but that doesn't make it real. I see a pantheon of reasons to believe in something that can save us. From a hangnail to a dead body. Who would be crazy enough to blame people. Or expect them to fix it.

Her headless barbie doll seemed to say it all as she gnawed on the heels that went with its gown. The dream house sorely lacking walls. The swimming pool that wouldn't hold water. Just a child. And so much learned already. About plastic boobs. Ill-fitting thongs. And boyfriends with missing balls.

Life. In orgasms too brief. Holes in the hat on her head. Driven like kittens' claws through the first layer of bruises. The word is the ladder. The touch is the fall. The heart is quicksand. Serpents. And soldiers. Design this happiness we call war.

The penguin. Frets the water just long enough to conquer. The bullet fucks the chamber. Children are everywhere. Life is. Ours to belittle. With so much of it.

He sells. Whatever he can. He sells teddy bears in pink, pink beds. He sells mothers to Viagra men. He pokes the rooster and convinces it to wake us up even though it's still dark.

Yellow windows count the steps between the sun and her bed. Years to die. Moments to live. She keeps her eyes closed until something sees her. The monsters or the angels. She doesn't know which. All candy chewed before. All empty wrappers. And teeth she can't prove belong to her.

I can't sleep anymore anyway. With the back door always unlocked. I just close my eyes and try very hard not to wake up ever again.

So little seems to matter. Since everything's become real.

Whatever could save me shouldn't interfere.

Perfect sleep that lasts for days. This body is an archive. This mind a graveyard. The dead what we live for.

Children in wet pajamas in beds made of clay. Chewing the feet off their barbie dolls. Because. Because her toes are always pointed. Because her boyfriend has no penis and her car never runs out of gas.

Cutting onions. As fast I can. The circus acrobatics of boredom. Empty clown shoes everywhere. I told them all to go away. I stole and built a dungeon from all their red foam noses. So that they wouldn't come back.

I only left behind the shoes. Plastic drugs at the heel of every step. White faces poached by painted grins. The amber of their long eyelashes turning the moon into a prison. Some soft rehab of salt and vinegar like how life tasted before I couldn't keep it down.

I'm sick. But I'm not stupid.

Cold. Obvious sex. The pantry open, but nothing's there except the mud on her dress. The traffic bubbles and roars. Sleeping bears in Lycra slippers wear the honey on their lips.

Sticky hands wipe at fleshy chalkboards. Lessons' ghosts stare back her from scaly walls. Marking her thighs with amounts. Reciting names like ingredients. School again. Sour teddy bears do her homework. While she busies herself with learning what. who she was.

Before.

She dreams out loud. Everyone hears her. She dreams in every color except blue. No one sees.

The panties wrapped around her wrists. Every thought like gumdrops. Stuck. A jawbreaker. Bitten. No one knows how sharp those heel are as she walks.

Tracing the stone. Oedipal pencils draw. Savage conclusions to a dying art. Feeble gods in chambers of lead. Sink to the depths of her stare. Like she is listening to everyone at the same time. And cannot hear the words she's said.

For the first time.

And the last.

Derelict accusers fail their burden. Acquittal a more fitting punishment. Both for the stone she swallowed and for the lump it left in her throat.

The bed blinks at the back of her head. Cold and fluorescent. Stuttering to life in sermons too loud. Melting creamsicles roll down her wrists. Just as she remember it.

When it was cold, but sweet enough that it didn't matter.

She drags the stone. No longer able to lift it.

Still it goes with her.

Over talks in riddles. Les its sock fall down. The pasty arithmetic of purchased men. And those that are bankrupt.

Drawings in the water like food coloring on the softest of your wounds. Playing the song with missing chords. Saying the prayer to gods you've given up on.

We're all dealers. Doling out the future to strangers across the tables. We're all bettors. Wagering on the bluff. We've been fooled before. It could happen again.

Losing isn't that different from the win. Except that you wonder sometimes whatever happened to them.

Measuring the strength of their wisdom by how much it hurt.

She names her enemies by the number of cigarettes she's smoked to defeat them. Her lovers are a bit more of a riddle. Photographs she can't develop, but swears to have taken. Bartering with strangers for the words they chewed from her lips. A pale iceberg of pantyhose melt dear to the bone. In weak crutches. In sour chokes of bubble gum she's still content to chew.

If I look for answer I might find one. And then what would I do? Spend my life soiling every cradle until I find the one that is mine. The snow drowned in itself. Dead coal eyes still looking for a mother. Remove the Styrofoam from between all those blow jobs and finally embrace the bruises.

I can't.

I don't.

And neither do you. Know how the teddy bear suffers. The pain of the objects that silently sleep with us.

Even when I'm not the weaker of us. French maids high on justice. Fishnet judges harsher than you'd think. The skirt is jury. The heels are judge. When I take them off at last. Hidden reservoirs in the feminine that turn all this rain into a way to quench my thirst.

I can't.

You wont.

We've plenty of lies left to tell each other.

Just not enough time.

We were close enough to know how far away we were.

It never rains here anymore. Slot machines of clouds never pay off. We're too close to the end of the world. You and I. Me and them. Strange friends I dream about when there's an army of me all trying to assassinate the original.

She's uninterested. Busies herself inspecting the horns she imagines must be hidden under too much hair. Love by invitation only. Or tickets bought in advance.

Like all art it's pretentious. And caters to those who least understand it. Like all forms of expression it's meant to be sold to the highest bidder.

But not until we're dead.

I was asking the bottle to imagine itself without me. It laughed and said I was wrong. Catch your sloppy joes in slotted spatulas. What do you expect. You want the hamburger, but not to kill the cow.

You're a silly girl who doesn't know what she wants until it doesn't want her. An omelet of unbroken eggs. Enjoying being ignored. Content enough just to watch things dying. You're a poorly drawn cartoon that's only funny if you don't want to laugh. Only pretty when you're masturbating to an angry song.

It couldn't be simpler. The physics of antipathy. Like yellow jackets too bored to sting. Drowning in allergic skin.

Too strong. To win. Too weak. To lose. They say my name, but it can't be real. They dress the child in dead light bulbs and wait patiently for the doorbell to ring.

Stealing the apples from the hands of Eve.

Diabetic moments spoil the heart into thinking it's aware of what it wants. Or can stand to have.

Something so sweet.

Little orphans of God. In bloated knapsacks. Decision just a grin. All the empty sneakers. Tongues on the carpet licking songs I'd bought long ago, but hadn't heard till now. Pimples from the face of saviors paint the mirror. Eyes like dominoes. Stand.

Waiting to fall.

I won't be saved that way. Surrendering everything. Isn't that what I already am?

People. An economy of submission. Little orphans of God work their puzzles in pieces of pieces. I'm broken. Assemble me. I'm lost. Come seek me. I'm naked. Dress me up. I'm drunk. And sober is all I can remember of you.

In lives obese with truth we starve on the lies. Little thunderstorms too shy to play in the mud they've made. Watch.

Condoms left on the floor divide the room into choices. Tall glasses of unsweetened lemonade rape the ice in our drinking glasses. But I'm too thirsty to care how it tastes.

Too tired to argue with anymore gods.

In a world she doesn't live in anymore. There's still weather without her. Comedy and drama. People living as though she was never there.

She writes to the person she isn't anymore. Long letters on the other side of the paper she'd saved from the life she had before. Red ink slips its veins deep into the white. She remembers. In buckets of skin. Soured away from the bone. In fits of love more experiment than promise. She tells the glass to wait. She's not ready to be seen again.

She's still too ugly. To look out.

Louder than her solitude. Quieter than her fear. Small blankets on big beds plow through the moments. In words her fingers tell her to say. In eulogies she's always imagined would be hers, not theirs.

She was never alone until someone else was there. Then gone. Her thought process a three-legged dog on stilts dancing the mambo with its clothes on the floor. She was no one. She was nothing. But it never bothered her at all. Until the window went both ways.

The phone bill was so uninteresting lately. But french films always made the world smaller for her. Hot showers left running as our bathrobes are coming off.

Sex is a violence of a sort. Stabbing at the gods inside their skin. Never making a wound. Drawn by this broken pencil.

Drawing with it. As if I'd never loved them. Or needed to. I didn't. You know. I didn't tell the hare to lose. But I never bet on him to win. The threads on her mini skirt asking coyly to be undone. In bouts of chess too much like the conversations we used to have. Mazes of flesh create the passages. And the dead ends.

When there's nothing left to say I'm most vocal then. She remembers the boots. Chunky heels castrating her lovers. As though they were actually hers. She remembers the perfume. The smell of anticipation. As she pretended to undress.

She remembers feeling found, yet still being lost.

What's not to love about the process. Fig leaves stomped into the garden's floor. The pretty chaos we like to call happiness. In shoulders heavy. In the daze of weary crossing guards. The path is mapped. In pastel footprints only corpses can see. Magic funerals where dying is the prefect climax to a life barely lived.

The sequence. In stormy dualities. Judges young equations. As they struggle with the demands of logic. Truth in plain sails. The wind anything but compliant. As paper sketches our course across lines of wind.

I couldn't cheat the devil. I'm not that clever. I couldn't convince the angels. I'm not that pitiful. So I just said what I was thinking. I just asked for what I wanted. Hoping never to get it.

What would there be to do then?

Simon says, stop counting. Stop trying to prove what you already know.

I was trying to explain to him. Skin is just perspective. How many drinks have you had? I asked. He answered, but I wasn't listening. It sounded too much like rehearsal. And underwear hitting the floor after selling too much to too many people. How many drinks have you had? I repeated the question.

He didn't answer. Not out loud.

It's an ugly tradition. This contest of sickness. Like we're trying to hate ourselves. Or are too stoned to pull out the syringe. They won't, but we'll still wait. For the hole they should reveal.

The arrows in the air like a breath held in place until we can open our eyes again and see who we've been trying to consume.

I was saying it would be easier if we were hopeless. Like everyone does when they aren't. Making my point to trolls guarding bridges no one ever crosses.

Confident in the politics of love until the votes started to come in.

I'm not averse to losing again.

You say what you're thinking in bits of dodgeball. Hit or be hit. Lapses of reason hardly momentary. The turbulent quack of empty rooms as they tumble in on the eyes watching them. Toddlers in soft shoes still fumbling with the prospect of freedom. Utterly unaware of how virulently dependence will seek its revenge.

Little fairy tales tick off the dosages we've used. Huffing on the dick of the cure. Disease is. Sickness is. Pretending we could ever be those people we were. Addiction is. Hopelessness is the whore of happiness. The heroin in each touch as our humility soils the bed.

I'm not ready to be vulnerable. Nor have I ever been. Choices are seldom what we make of them.

But none of that is the problem.

It's the gap. The hot, sour asphalt from now to whenever. This silent alarm never warns anyone.. There's just a lot of screaming no one can hear.

Sex like dodgeball. And penises like stitches falling out.

Talking to the ladders. In spits of paint as we reach for the ceiling with dirty brushes. No more mirrors overhead. No more rivers overlooking the ruthless saviors in our pants.

We're undone.

Woken up from dreams we'll never finish.

Tangled in the sails of this sinking boat.

Aching arms reaching for the naked spots above us.

Arguing with the staircase. In torn sails. The democratic election of apathy. Every vote counted only if it's correct.

With broken crayons. With scissors in her heart. The picture is drawn. In tiny pieces. Useless cuts. Spoil the lines she'd drawn.

In the remainders. Weak diaphragms sputter out the moments in sour ballads more irony than truth. Could we separate them. The equation. In the distance between traffic lights. The chirp of lazy brakes. For miles we can't recall. Gowns off the rack wear our dubious proms. In dances we never shared. Songs as strange then as they are now.

You're my savior. And my Satan. You're the cacophony that proves there is music. I wish I could still hear. The dead things that made us alive.

The future in its calm restraints. Looking forward to the whip. Bad dogs in good cages. Worshipping the lock. Some oft repeated porno I can't learn to love.

The roots of the trees arguing with sidewalk. Winning. Despite where we step. The old man crying into his wine glass. I've been everywhere. And no place.

I've loved every woman I possibly could.

And they're all the same.