Doorbells and cyanide. In that order. No one's home. No one has been for so long. Laughing too confident. Fatted martyrs feast on each other. Chapped lips arguing with the mirror. As if it actually sees their their thirst.

Cold sheep bleating in a dark barnyard.. Hoping to be naked again soon.

Piss and peppermint. All he could swallow. Or spit up. As the case demanded. I couldn't find a lie. Only the suspicion. Filthy flags groping at a democracy that will forever remain a virgin.

Change always comes too late. After we don't need it. A future begging us to let it happen.

But the choice. That is what I miss most about having decided.

No diabetic sex to blame for the coma. No cells to accuse of treason. Sex turns its parlor tricks for the wide eyed, but we are not misled.

Never sleep. Never dream. Never wake up.

Indebted only to small lies told in moments of surrender. Small lies that keep getting bigger.

Take your spasms away with you in tiny tears. Loose fit skin that sells for much more than cost. The sleepwalk is the best I can do. Lies untold. Unexpected. And therefore not cruel. Ghost never buried. Let the dead free to scold us. The rulers down our backs keep us staring at the empty blackboard. Chalk dust writes its eulogies. We attempt to measure moments, But they're too small to count. Fingertips at the ready to taste the freedom time has absolved.

Chosen. By design. Broken crayons still try to color in the empty outlines.

This pale solution to such vivid nightmares. Is just to wake up.

Turn off the demons like light switches. Let the darkness decide.

Where I am.

He was speaking in skins. Lifting weights on every breath. Waiting for the rotten fruit to become edible again. Bartenders in some fairy tale of blinking eyes that never happen to see what's staring at them.

Hearing the stop sign, but deciding not to listen.

Life. Like bubble gum breaking between careless lips. Stuck to faces that quickly forget.

Laughing sadly about the many haunted houses we've slept in to get to this one.

The stones seek their language. In bit and pieces. The doctor is overcome by his medicines. Tongues. Like treasure maps. Counting the steps to heaven.

She imagines the cradle in the tree rocking. Full of hope someone has to hate.

Pop!

She continues chewing her gum. She loves the taste of nothing.

Cupid's on heroin saving up the methadone.

The man waiting for the elevator fascinated her. A stolen souvenir of humanity in a marathon of machines. Tired of running and never much good at it, she decided to forfeit the prize.

She was glad she did.

The eclipse took place just as it should. Skeptical lovers turning envelopes inside out. Looking for proof of something for which there can be no evidence. Satyrs in their bubble baths advancing their pawns nearer to the back of the board. Conversations like taffy stretched too far. And stuck to my teeth.

The road was humble. The lies arrogant. As he steered her away from the oncoming traffic. Eager for the collision she lamented his decision to save her from herself. Who was he to do such a thing?

Just a man like any other. Just a penis on a Popsicle stick called intellect. Just some hard caramel in a wrapper I never should've undone.

Bedtime stories for the rest of us.

You leave in your mind before you're ever really gone. Discarding theoretical lips. Wringing the words down the drain. Soiled soap carries the filth away. In permutations of a karma that fill the holes in our flesh with dead skin.

And so we wait. for the new to come and push it away.

The very idea is poison. Surfactants convince the moments to mix. Lies like detergents soften the soil that keeps up apart. We're barren. Not clean. We haven't saved ourselves. We've orphaned them.

In the candy store which so much resembled his hardening heart. The molecules of sugar discussed the differences between sitting on the shelf and being eaten. It was, they supposed, suicide either way. Or murder. Depending how much you hate yourself.

Tracing the sun through a dirty pane of glass. Thick markers make a mess of the finer points. It's only art if you can't control it. It's only beautiful when it defeats us.

Yesterday. Even after tomorrow it still weighs so much.

Nowhere. That I can think of.

Poor diseases too long healed. The sports car in his pants shifting gears. Sober engines talking like drunks. Wherever they go. Pretending to care. about helpless ken dolls searching for their penises. Amongst so many dead gods.

If one word could matter that much. Dead jeans attracting thighs too swollen to fit. Leave us alone. Wait for the bookstore. The signing of wasted stories. I've told so many times. The dissection of assholes under microscopes to accurate. Little wolves blowing down big houses.

Absent piglets.

Fail the tongue. Sour darts strike the bulls eye in the bleats of dying lambs. Circumstance evolves. Weighing the blood against the bandages. Long shots. Cold bluffs. Still to be determined.

Lovers. Carbons of dead skin. Old cameras. Still waiting on the negatives to develop.

Lies we should have, but will never tell.

Time. An avalanche of people. Moments. I wish I could remember. Or otherwise prove that I've forgotten.

The hour is my nemesis. In this trail of fragments I can no longer assemble.

The leopard looks. Find its skin on he ass of the elephant. Nothing to regret or to save.

Ghosts too stubborn to argue with.

At this angle the moon seems more a measure than a mark. For how distant everything is. Wax fingers perpetuate the flood of not forgetting where I have been. Desire like dominoes. One tumbling down causing all the others to fall. It was never fate. Just lonely people committed to their prisons.

The fork in the story comes not from the author. The characters are to blame. Interrupted epiphanies turn down the collars on heavy beds. The fluorescent lights make all the white sheets blue. So I can see the empty where there is everything.

The hours measuring themselves in years. Futures. A paradox of conditions not met. I'm here. And there. I'm everywhere I've ever been. Stealing paths not taken.

Drawing ears on deaf pillows.

She thinks in sounds. She sees in touch. Losing her virginity every night to nightmares she can't remember. Purple skin whispers of stories she may have read. A long time ago. Missing underwear hides between the pillows waiting to be discovered. She sleeps in dogs. Feral curs afraid to growl at because all their fangs have fallen out. Nothing, but the meat left to covet. No desire to feed the hunger.

It always comes back. Deeper than it left.

Same movie different actors. Same con. Different victims.

The sheets discuss her when she's not listening. Some pale infant not quite ejaculated from her mother's womb. Half born by. Half smothered. In so much potential.

With a Trojan smile and wooden skin she waited silently for the ambush in her head to win.

Ready to die and not knowing how. Such an unfortunate predictament.

Suicide is illegal. Weird. Why? Because people think they're that important. People. Bits of toilet paper I use to wipe the shit from my ass. People. Articulate monkey's talking to deaf gods. Praying. Pretending anyone's listening.

There's no reason at all for anyone to live. We're all useless. Replacable. Mice in traps. Selling each other happiness at a profit.

Suicide is the answer. Because the world could stand a few less people in it.

Why encourage people not to die? Why tell strangers you care if they live? Because mortality is too much to bear. Because god took his phone off the hook and satan's voicemail is full again.

I've always been dying. Coloring in the carcasses of demons. Grey rainbows of skin deciding how sad it was. Being her. The liars looking for the off switch. To change burnt bulbs. To convince rumplestilskins the child is already dead.

Suicide is the answer. To every question I've ever asked.

Her dress being bored with her she took it off. In bits and pieces. Like dissassembling a giant jigsaw. Words are pretentious. Or otherwise self-serving. Still, I have nothing else to offer. Thoughts. Bloody tampons I'm afraid to discard.

The life inside my abdomen cycling. On and off. In graceless spasms of missing children. And people forgotten. Or at least I tried to. Forget.

Sleepy gods on ambivalent crutches hurrying the legless along. In arrogant parades that only make it that much harder to get home.

I can't take everyhing off, but I can still be undressed.

The dead match promising to light your last cigarette,

My conversation with the onion was just getting interesting when the garlic interrupted with some schematics for its time machine. It said something about global warming, straightened its leg warmers and blamed madonna before it disappeared into someplace I had already been.

I kept cutting. I had a tuna sandwich echo repeating in my belly.

I was surprised when the garlic returned only moments later with a feathered haircut and wearing acid washed jeans. It said it had been there. Back to the eighties. Cold war. Gorbechov. Nancy. And the slutty virgin. It laughed. You think I stink?

And then it zipped off to the future. Warning me not to visit. If I can help it.

The onion didn't care at all. And I wouldn't have either if my garlic wasn't gone.

Everything leaves. Somethings do it better.

He brought in the speakers. Inch by inch until everything sounded like she remembered. Too much treble. Too much bass. A lot of strangers paying for their highs with drunken women. Or postcards from their mother's they'd yet to read.

She turned off the amplifier and tried to listen to the nothing. Feigning deafness until they started scraping the chalkboard.

All the erasers gone they decided there was still time to lie enough. Black markers seeping through thin paper. She thought about saving what she'd written, but changed her mind when she found out the words had decided she couldn't be trusted. With all those little shoes that barely fit on the feet she'd gnarled playing so often with dolls she'd only remember by hating herself.

Taking off their clothes in tiny doses of hysteria. Sad clown smiles losing their makeup. Sirens at the back of her throat looking for someone to blame. Besides herself.

The fruit is over us. Bored.

Too cold to bleed.

The battery is dead.

I don't know how to pick a peach, but I do know how to eat one. Bite hard. And swift. Let the juices run down your chin staining your clothes in sticky traces of the flesh you've consumed.

Then wear those clothes until everyone you encounter can almost taste what was inside you.

The only difference between sedatives and amphetamines are the people who take them. Same reason. Different methods. Every addiction is born in childhood. Some dark face you can't recognize, but fingers you won't forget. Every savior is doused in blood because how else could we relate to them. Recovery is a failure of sorts. A failure to manage our pain with the treatments we've chosen. A failure to prove the art we've made truly belongs to us.

I don't know how to execute a dream, but I do know how to have one. Go to sleep assuming you'll never wake up.

I don't know how to draw a circle, but I do know they're seldom perfect.

I didn't pick the peach, but I tasted it. Summer. Moons I hadn't seen in ages. Arguments explaining why it's never dark enough to see what's above us.

I don't know what hope there is hidden past the stars, but I do know how to find them.

Turn off the lights.

Stop seeing what isn't there.

Forgetful Stalins searching for their bus pass. In a world where everything is lost. Take us there. As the stars take the universe a little closer to our grasp. Unreal, yet possible to imagine.

Nervous threads hold the blanket to the floor. Waiting for indications from the absentee gods that those flesh stains aren't contagious. Staying naked like this. Without any skin on. Only seems to prove me wrong. It is a choice. It's just a bad one.

The communists had it right. Take everything in sight. Give all you have. You'll have nothing either way.

All I can want pales in comparison to what is gone. Weighing the dogs. Measuring the drugs. Equations of high make deciding optional. dying a formality amongst so many empty skins.

Turn off the stars. Flip the switch on the moon. Tell the nightnmares to be at the
ready.

I remember.

Everything.

Talk louder the mockingbird said. Your Atticus isn't very convincing. I was there. I saw everythhing, but the words are more than I can lift. We were in the attic. Scoring the last window left to break. Throwing our lives hard at absent strangers.

Groins grinning broad in permanent marker. The mockingbird's song tracing around her shifting skin. Truth taking its photographs. Destroying the negatives. The lawyer with his speech interrupted. The victim on trial yet again.

Talk louder. Let me listen. The mockingbird begged. I have nothing without the songs of others.

Like anyone, I can only give as much as I've been given.

The attic. Plastic forks weighing the meat left after all the flesh has been taken.

Plastic forks weighing nothing. Chemical burns at the beginning of every conversation. Neglected acids trying to convince us to use them.

Little band-aids taking with them so much skin.

Time is agile and stubborn. Underwear still smelling of transient debates with touch. It says it knows, but I don't think it does. How brief the moments are that divide then and now. Trial and error. Myself and her. A little girl. Some fatty discharge hidden under an old scar. The faint hint of puke in a forgotten taste of someone else.

Calm morticians painting the smirk on dead faces. In desperate scribbles I find too familiar.

Epitomes like bubble gum. Expanding. And bursting all over our faces. Synonyms of change negotiating a treaty with dead men.

You can always talk to a ghost. It will always listen, but it'll never say what you want to hear.

Thighs like canvas unpainted. The whispers of her dress concealing what had always shown. Liars like poets making the worst things beautiful. Come paint the cage. Making it your home. Name the claws that cut you. Take notes. This is test material.

Choosing her lipstick in shades of revulsion. Save me because I deserve it. Wrtie to all my lies and tell them the party is tomorrow. Gifts are optional.

Warn the snake, it's a thin corruption. I have so much more to learn of betrayal.

Teach me.

How young was I then? The insipid traffic of youth conveying itself through crowded intersections in bedtime stories stolen from hungry wolves and dead pigs.

You can only be mortal. Can only forgive yourself if you're certain no one else will. Still I can dismiss these heavens for something real.

Dog shit on the carpet. Bills to pay and lies to utter. Open zippers at the back of my neck waiting for someone to pull on them.

As if we can choose who we are. Screw the umbrella. Let it rain on me.

Cartoon eyes confessing balefully. Gravity meticulously choreographing every expression on their faces. She steps on a kiss and laughs. There is no carpool lane for hurried moments. No desserts named after us.

We're just people. Meat wearing fancy undergarments. Totem poles speaking with wooden tongues. Everyone hears, they just don't know what.

Spoiled by so many lies she finally admits the truth.

The demons are canvas. And the angels acrylic. Still, life is all watercolors. Campfires hating the folk songs and ghost stories. Big feasts and only the carcass left to crave.

I can pick up the bones and make new people out of them.

In little bits of skin that nearly wore us.

Loose skin looking for drawstrings in the moment. Zippers in the smile that means nothing. Escaped prisoners in a long occupation of liars and sex. Found attics in a failing war. Salvation comes not upon being rescued, but accepting that you won't be. Some soldiers have guns, others only experience.

Browsing fault lines. Catalogs of men erupting. Chemical fires doused in blood. Until everything has fallen. And the pantyhose are all that's left of her flesh. Friendly enemies turn her surrender into triumph. She waits for the burns to heal. A puzzle of skin now, she waits to be solved.

Hooks in the meat as the knives carve the cow. All eyes discarded. Chains pull the the skin from the carcass. People dissect the shit from the meat.

Bad air fresheners and thin masks separate us from the things inside us. So many dead animals try to teach us to live.

Trenchcoats of skin making every one small. The rain deciding who we'd be next. Sad faces drawn in dirty clothes. Waiting for the floor to forget. The flood that made all these lies possible. Blisters on her eyes finally bursting open. The truth infects us. Makes us weak. Turns this drowning grey. Sparse deaths feeding perpetual comas.

At one with the paranoia of a healthy heart. Committed to the promise of loss.

I stood out in the rain memorizing each drop I was able to catch. Then I went inside and began subtracting how many I'd missed.

There was no counting involved. Just a lot of lions with their cages drawn on. And too many people with erasers.

Corduroy skin shifts to change its song. Tired explainations condone wasted sobriety. Rachet it down. Wrenching the cause from the victim. Blaming them. As all forms of justice inssists. Weighing my illusions against the torn feet of discarded dolls. Measuring my worth in blow jobs. Moments wasted pleasuring others.

Little glimpses of happiness between sucking dicks. Burns resolving to new skin.

Parasites promising to swallow the infection.

Men like needles full fo vaccine. Bits of the disease to make us immune.

Penises on trial. Lonely vaginas still searching for the wizard.

Hopeless Dorothy's still clicking their heels.

Reactions dance like crippled sleep. A murder without a corpse. Revising sober. Rewriting apathy. Paper dolls fucking their scissors.

I don't. Won't. Know. Or admit to remembering. Ever having felt anything.

Now is circumstance too confident. Now is shit waiting in yesterday's bowels. I can't touch what I can't see. Nightmares electing better Satans by which to sin. I cure myself everyday. By night I'm sick again.

Ice melting in empty glasses. Words said too late to matter.

Strangers.

Broken nails everywhere. Bruised fingers pointing at what isn't there.

The demon was busy with feeling up barbie dolls. Plastic tits were his favorite kind. The ladder was obvious. More obvious than he could stand. As thirsty as any nightmare has ever been. Tiny microscopes examining huge assholes.

If you're looking for proof I'm not it.

The liars she knew were good ones. Chessboards of skin imaginging the king trapped. Moving forward seems such a deep concession knowing how far back this goes.

I could cheat the rabbit. Alllow it to win the race. Maybe I already have. Exchanged epiphanies with that wolf. Debated what it takes to blow this house down. And decided it isn't worth it.

She was more or less sober. Defiantly so. With big tattoos on her brain in gaseous spasms of neon. With letters bigger than the paper she was writing on. Sober. Like a fawn is just before it's eaten. Sober she thought. Just like the sky is right before it pours.

Men she proclaimed are like free ketchup packets. You can take as many as you want, but who would take more than a few. You tear them open with your teeth and pretend the meat you're eating tastes better than it does. Calm like the breath of heavy ribs trying to decide how much of that skin is theirs.

She lies and says she doesn't know why no one's listening. And everyone is. Paled decisions blot out the landscape of skin. And she must choose. Again. Which lie to believe.

Her own or others.

Lie to me she thought. The truth has nothing to do with it.

The mannequins are wearing the wrong clothes. The child is deciding how much to grow from this experience. Too many timelines for any one life to manage. I'm there. And then. Everywhere and no place. If you see me remind me again what time it is.

We compared our famines. Everyone was a winner. Burnt doll feet soup in their plastic shoes. Lead in their footsteps. Conversing with the doorbell in linear explanations. As if time were a constant. Or even something to be measured.

Take me off. In ripe dismissals of everything I was. Chew on these filthy feet. You've not gone far, but your hunger is all the same sincere. The callous stammers of wasted flesh like a constant strobe light on every touch.

Alone we dance. Together we convulse. To music that no one else can hear.

Her eyes unravelling like cellophane wrappers. Soft candy with a hard center. She told him to bite down. Reveal her weaknesses. Release the goo that means I'm human. Because I don't know if I am a person. There are flaws in all things. So where is my proof. That this long game of monopoly has any purpose other than to make me lose.

Passed go too many times to remember.

Bought Park Place thinking I had won.

And I would have if it weren't for those damn hotels.

How can you know I'm lost unless you've been there?

If I were anyone at all. More in any way than fated outlines drawn awkwardly on empty pages. Then maybe I wouldn't try so hard to be what I am not. This false concubine seducing nothing and everyone.

If I were as young as I were then I'd tell myself to watch out for old men. Old men with money to spend and no one to envy. I'd warn myself that lies are just truths trying to make us change our minds. In some strain of reverse psychology that only makes sense when you're fucking strangers.

Arguing with the hours as they search for their underwear. Knowing they are right.

It's all just cum and saliva until he shuts the door. Then I see all the things we forgot to take off.

The child. Deciding. The crippled dog. Hunting. So outside. Novel Coloring books in her skin imagining where his reds would go. The ambulance. The stretcher. Preparing for the worst of the blood. Deciding I would only bleed so much. Letting them. Create the suicide. In little leaps between dimensions.

You were there, but I was gone. The fable proving us wrong again. As if I couldn't live long enough to determine if the moral was accurate.

Paper dolls. Strung together. Mouths drawn in after the fact. Paper dolls. Hands near enough to touch.

How at home you are knowing tomorrow isn't coming. Factor twelve. Pi executes itself in a long, wandering eulogy. Warning us that life has as many decimal places to go.

Extinguished dragons. Legless dogs. Pale like a tv with the captions off. I prefer their voices to come from my head. The actors are useless when the story is your own. And all their stories are mine. Written seconds before they speak. If this is addiction I think I prefer it. Finding myself in the phlegm of rogue sneezes that bespeckle my shirt.

A calm madonna ready to be worshipped, but finding her disciples less than eager. I've plenty of blood to spill. You need only cut me.

Red. Sure. Determined.

To see again.

All that was never there.

I was watching this weird french movie. Except that's redundant because all french movies are weird. Smug with sex and violence. The french seem to know more than any other culture that there is wisdom to be derived from self-indulgence. That sex is a mirror for everything else in our life and skin is not just a cover, but more a window than any of the more laudeded organs.

That's not innuendo. It's just crass observation.

True, american movies are full of sex and violence too, but the sex is all covert and deceptive. The french don't cover their sex in bundles of sheets and loud music. They wear their sex right on their faces. It's not that sex is so important, it's just that it is integral to everything we are. Everyone speculates about what separates humans from animals. But I've always known it's sex. Animals are driven by instinct and nature. Animals have sex because nature has designated them to do so. People have sex because it is what we want.

We were silicone. Slippery daisies in thick skins. I was at the top. Or close enough. To know I'd never get that far. He pretended to call the ambulance. Rescued wasn't any of the choices on my test.

Memory is a stranger. Thick outlines that pretend to know where to draw. Finding ourselves in bits of broken mirrors. Faulty gods like dynamite with lapsing fuses. They would kill us if they could remember how.

But we already know what's gone. No need for lessons about losing each other.

The nightmare was in the doorway. Sereptitiously taking its clothes off. Skin broken into syllables. Chunks of breath too small to hold all we'd said. The fingerprint was on the doorbell. Songs I so seldom hear. He took off his tie and hung himself with it. It was only then that I finally noticed the knot was wrong.

She was gathering her barbie dolls into factions. Keep and discard. More concerned with the war than its outcome. Fighting she presumed for reasons beyond her. The choke hold of high heels rewriting the heart. Into something contagious. Convincing the moment that all those fragments had once been whole.

I'm not hearing the words.

When they tell me it's hopeless I only hear ropes. Gods in gym class. Cruel teachers. The ceiling so far away. Lost faces like phosphorus and calcium. Make everything harder.

White paper drowning in ink. Broken closet doors negotiating with familiar demons. Skeletons slipping into tuxedoes of skin. What was mine. Flesh has all kinds of reasons. I'm just not one of them.

Children written in long words. Forgetting what they mean. Fighting with the pencil over what to lines to draw. The emtpy page more of a comfort than all the friends I've ever known.

The planets laugh at us from afar. Treating the universe like a cold sore. Biting my lip until I can find a real cure. Balloons that don't leave just because the string has broken. Words that don't recall wh we started.

Calm factories of people selling us to ourselves.

Until there's no one else left.

Except the dolls we've undresssed.

Steady in her multiplication.

She's still counting.

Trying to decide who to hate. And when.

Dan at Poetic Justice recently tagged me with a Roar for Powerful Words Award. A meme of sorts passed amongst us creative folks. I want to thank him for including me.

The recipients then have the task of sending the award off to five others as well as stating three reasons they think make writing powerful. The latter doesn't sound difficult, but I'm not sure I know five people.

To be honest I'm really not a fan of memes. I truly appreciate him including me. I do. But memes just seem too similar to chain letters for my liking.

I do however have to take this opportunity to say if I did create such a list of writers for such an award, Lonely Roads & Psycho Paths would be my first choice.

And if I knew for sure what makes writing powerful I wouldn't have to practice so much.

Some unknown. Perpetual epiphanies conceal chronic relapses. She's a princess. In doll clothes. Foil earrings and fingers of petroleum. Sparse rain falling into broken reservoirs.

Terminals. Eyes like dashboards. How far we've gone to get back to where we started. Love is casual. Love is certain.

We are not.

Waking the dinosaur in small increments. Doses of clarity only make it harder to see in this darkness.

Every breath is a habit. An addiction of some sort. Touch the evidence. Orgasm the proof. Assembling each other as we do. Shoving the puzzles peices into places they don't belong. Living as thoughtlessly as we do. Trying on wings that don't belong to us. I don't want a cure. Just a better sickness.

I slept through my own funeral. I didn't want to know who wasn't there.