Rigid glances smear color of her kiss. Abstracted. Neglected Rapunzels let down their hair. From towers feeble with love. All stories told too many times. Victims. In billowing gowns that fit too well.

It's easier to be hurt. To be broken. She tells him. Then you know what to wait for. Otherwise we're just meat. Lingering on the bone. Mourning the skin the heat has seized.

I'm better off weak. Like all addicts are. The hook through my cheek hurts, but I'm resigned to it. I can go so far. So far.

Weak doesn't lie to me. Try to tell me I can get better. It's days. Months spent distilling the venom. Into words. Gaps in the poison. Just long enough to say I am dead.

Little aliens. Freckles of hate on her cheeks. They failed me. And I them. In all the ways humanity is supposed to save us. I drank so much that Star Trek finally made sense. In that weird way when you can overlook the paradox. Of being in a time where you've yet to exist.

He told me I was good, but could be better. To which I replied not at all. He couldn't save me. Nor I him. And what did we need saving for? All the monsters being in our heads. Or otherwise wishing they could go back there. Like the good little hells they are. Seeking the sins. Not the sinners.

There is so much to say. So much nothing.

It's easy to believe some one's listening.

Or moreso that they will remember their betrayal.

Cocksucker. Formaldehyde lips grin deep. With jagged teeth. Missing underwear. Yellow fangs. Bitch. Melted chocolate on severed fingers. Cast the flag. Silence the piper. The rodents have taken over heaven.

Each moment is my savior. As I stumble one to the next. Each hour is my judge as I pierce the skin of so many fallen apples. You can cry god, but he never cries us. Liar in the sky drowning his ant farm.

To start another.

As if we never were.

Or had been his likeness.

He's the failure. Not us. And therefore is inadequate.

Heaven, I have found, lies precisely in the middle between the entry and the exit of unsolicited cocks. A kingdom of torn vaginas hoping to cover their asses.

The slope. The tender anecdote between words and sweat. Time in fables called memory. The truth becomes us. In feeble thrusts. The cough. Tin lungs. Alone exploding in bits of touch. Lips of Lycra cling hard to the shape of us.

and just as easily forget.

Down. The empty anthill in the rain. All turning to mud. The scout. Bringing fairy tales back to the colony. Buzzing briefly with bigger and better gods.

Then. Tournaments of skin running through us in broken marathons. Pretending we could ever go that far.

Now. Cheating the darkness in little jumps. Of rope not tied. To anyone. Losses. Quick. As the world is. To prove us wrong.

Or try.

Your ducks all in a row. Quack. Quack. Simeon ledgers count backwards from the profit. Or loss. As it fits the moment.

Told secrets on the whims of metaphor. Depleted demons to come to my defense. Since I don't know anymore. Why it matters.

He said I was naked, but I knew I was still dressed. As well as any oyster knows the pearl is still thee. Long Journeys to the end of the Earth. As if there are margins in which to write our notes. Or any place that still remembers searching.

A leak in the pillow suffocates his stare. We both die traversing the desert between us. Sere skin poisoned by too much sunlight.

All the things meant to keep us alive killing us.

Chasing the vortex. Tiny lions trying to roar. Assembling the universe in sloppy stitches and matted hairs. Lies I've yet to tell to people I still don't know. The black hole of together draws us closer. Tears us apart. We are nothing. Not each other. Nor ourselves. Just pieces constantly coming together and falling apart.

Staring at the mediocrity principle apparent in his empty socks. Explaining to herself why it should matter. Admitting that it never has.

Small universe. Big lies.

The dog's still wagging his missing tail.

I was his wormhole. Packages of future in bundles of past. All wrapped in pretty bows and willing to pretend none of this is real.

Sionara kittens in the backseats of loose fit pants. So many claws. So few scratches.

Sharp candy canes. That's what happens when you suck on sweet things. They hurt you. Or will. Eventually. Awkward phrases pool in her throat as she attempt to speak. Often forgetting to actually say the words. Conversations. Like dirty diapers needing to be changed. Used condoms in the grim afterwards of barely strangers.

Tomorrow comes in spasms. Epileptic fits of life rush into crowded brain stems. Bent antennae searching for transmissions long since lost. Even minor abortions leave their scars. Dead zones where the fetuses languish in a place between ourselves and them. Like we all do.

Every day.

Without ever knowing for sure what's gone.

Sad clowns have the advantage. Painted as they are. Three legged dogs outrun us. As we chase our tails.

Recovery is the old self and yet, the old self is what brought us here. I go back to her every night. She just never lets me stay there.

I've taught the monkey to dance. It's the right song we wait for.

Small people carrying big bags. Short trips that last too long. Waiting for jesus with a hand full of matzo balls. Finding god in unanswered calls. I can only breathe when you're far enough. Neutered tigers show their claws. In long debates where there is no winner. Just adversaries and no one to root for. The cosmetology of people leaves me wondering if that is all we are. Portraits in attics turning ugly. Truths no one sees until the ugly finally catches up with them.

Living as this pale bishop. Next to the king. The queen taken already. We've lost. If the squares are any measure of our hearts. The treble in motion. The bass on pause. Almost as if you were listening when I said what I did. About falling asleep next to someone and waking up to find they had gone.

The only difference between sadness and words is ownership.

I'm rich. I'm fucking wealthy. By those standards.

Scabs of snot on her bed linens. Indicate where she hides her face while she sleeps. Stolen away from this world in small steps. Stewing in dreams she can't remember having ever possessed.

Making up sex in small gulps of friends. The ceremony of touch carrying on long after she has stopped counting. The years between. Then and now. Angry bears coming home to messy beds and missing porridge. Dead girls in worn stockings failing to reason with circumstance.

Pretending she had heard him when he said she didn't know what. A kite. Its long string teasing her hand. That she could touch the clouds. Move the sun. See again.

Power she muttered to herself. Control. This decrepit time machine in my head keeps trying, but I'm still not there. Nor any closer than I was.

I keep soliciting the cancer. It doesn't answer. I've scared the disease away again. I always do. Frighten it. Dark clowns with too much to smile about. Love is just the punctuation in this slow death.

The prayers of monsters make beautiful songs when I'm alone like this. Wondering which time I'm in. Which one I've left behind to be here. Negotiating with the me's I've created going back so many times to find what was never there.

My favorite part being the paradox. For all this to have happened nothing before it could have.

I keep trying on their faces. Moments of math rationalize the skin. In chokes of drug hoping I'll remember their collapsing heavens. Reconstruct. All the lies life creates to make these habits seem worthwhile.

Those tight jeans. They do fit. If I hold my breath deep enough.

Doubt. Delusion. Whitney Houston in a cheek bone store. No staircase. Just stones for going down. And up. Up. And down. Sally Struthers in the back of the book. No text. Just numbers counting backward from zero.

Pretty monkeys on the gold swingset humming songs no one's written yet. No music. Just sound crawling away from its soiled bed.

Like all the little girls I used to play with when I was alone.

Everything is wide. Dilated and blind. Pretty lies I can believe. For now. In the flood of his flesh. I don't mind dying. Slowly.

Birthday presents left for her. Frivilous bows. And cards written in ink. The lie was just the beginning. He strangles me in tiny kisses. Until I'm not there anymore.

Little books. Tell the story of big girls. The men they've chosen. The wolf in the hallway searching for the moon just above his head. If only he could see it. Her underwear like a napkin wiping the crumbs from his lips. In broad smiles.

Loose zippers. Fumbling with dick. Seconds become years. In the scope of riches she sells herself. Love like a bright full moon opens up. To reveal what she's never seen. She finds herself in him. If only for a moment.

I can say his name, but I don't know it.

She leaves her socks on during sex. Because she has ugly toes. Because she can't explain why the beginning is so impatient.

He says she'll be happy as soon as she wants to be. And she still believes him.

After all these years.

This is how she loves him.

Masks. Showing. Faces. Muscle discarding skin. Thick diapers full of our shit. Bright rashes chronicle the neglect. Chambers of god showing.In coughing quotes from dying friends. You want to be alone. So be it.

Masks. Skin is guilty, but has a great attorney. Skin is guiltily, but is rich enough to buy its freedom. Skin like Velveeta. Turning colors that should never be eaten. I take a little more off until you're bored again.

Destroyed. Impotent at every milestone.

An old man wandering the innards of a girl. Soiled diapers. Broken teeth. In jars beside my bed. Masks. In the time travelled between heart and hand.

Let is go. Let us collide with the path. Each footstep promising progress.

Every breath sending us back.

Even the first demon had a teacher. Even the last demon has to admit. We lied well. Even if not enough.

The salt it makes a mask so perfect. I almost want to wear it.

I was debating with the ink. Slivers of skin all marinated in touch. His cardboard eyes helpless in the storm. Goodbye. A rented tuxedo that didn't want to fit.

No questions. Just the test. To fail and fail again. No words. Only pages of faces growing blurry. Bland Polaroids trace the shapes. The color's gone.

He drew a cat on a piece of paper. Imaginary claws presumed the taste of blood. He prayed. Like any good catholic boy would. To a god more excuse than salvation.

Watching the moon trying to prove it's there. As it chases us down the highway. In doses of men she still calls medicine.

in moments of surrender when the disease is most appealing. She wonders out loud. How to tell the difference.

Or if she ever could.

No one ever asks to be loved. They beg for it. In absent skirts and mediocre penises. The same way wormholes simultaneously talk to the future and the past we do. In rips and contortions of the flesh that is conditioned to move us through it.

Millions of cells. Tiny alarm clocks ringing under our clothes. Moments been. Or soon to. Good nights in tiny bottles Sips of mouthwash he called Rumplemints.

Strange nightgowns I fell asleep. Woke up undressed.

Can't go back. Paradoxes prevail. Can't go forward. Nowhere yet to go. Left with now. Sacrosanct progression. You slow the world down and you're in the future. Speed it up and the past is yours. I do it all the time, it just never sticks.

You take your pills. Learn to love again. Between episode of Star Trek. People you'll only have for a little while. Brief rifts in the space time continuum. But that doesn't matter.

Somewhere. Some place. One of you has gone back there. And knows how it feels.

She was looking for herself. The one that was made each time the future occurred. Rows of dominoes raping each other in a lurching vision of progress. There are so many of us, she said to her selves, quite matter of fact. So many time lines to extrapolate.

I used to think I was the unknown factor. Backwards. That's what happens when you travel time.

Too often.

Little changes cascade. Elephants shrink down to mice.

All the hers were talking at once. She couldn't understand herself. No one else was there. And everyone was.

She named the years. Dressed them each in different colors of the same outfits. Then began the arduous process of determining which versions she'd keep.

The trouble with time travel is that you can only go in one direction.

Once you choose - forward or back. There's no changing your mind.

The apple in the window was so appropriate. Temptation tantamount. I asked Eve what it was like being the mother of everyone. She just laughed and said those stories are for children and the weak. I was one of many who didn't listen. They chose my name for the story, but the truth is there were many snakes. And many men. Taking. What should be ours.

The things your parents tell you to shut you up. Behave. Santa Claus and God are watching.

The truth is, Eden was a terrible place to be a woman. The snake, he offered a way out. That's all I wanted. To not have to fuck that man again. To not have any more sons that would kill each other. The truth is, I wasn't the only woman. There were so many. Condemned to men. I was just the one they blamed.

Modified notions of exit. And reasons to. The outline in question not really wanting color at all. Just to be sampled. Salty bits of caviar left on stale crackers. For the rest of us to find. To believe we had actually been on the guest list.

Time is like putty. Because memory makes it such. The brain doesn't xerox. It reacts. In chokes of booze and fits of xanax. Colors are thrown upon the walls. Left to harden. And we move on. To find new whites. Blank spaces to let the rage live.

Time is not the measure. It's only a witness.

When the gods finally decide to wake up we'll have plenty to tell them. Until then, we continue to tell our stories as if someone is listening.

If it was long enough before I began negotiating with these questions I would've known better than to have ever asked.

That's the whole of it. Your tenderloin of sad smiles is getting cold. Still. It's a buffet. No one has to eat the leftovers. They'll vanish with the rest of the war that never was.

While in factories all over the world they continue creating passable facsimiles. Little frowns on big faces. Change perception. Change how I measure everything. I can weigh it only by my memory of what is missing.

Long snakes in the tunnels of her stare drip with venom. Welcome the poison. Selfish gods accumulating heavens. Death has always been there. Lethargic saviors work the integers. Each breath a grain of sand slipping through the thin waist of an hourglass.

I'm bartering with the darkness for one more peek at daylight. I'm explaining to the nightmare why I can't go back to sleep. It's all so obvious. But I still don't see it.

Long division. Decimals. Fractions. Of people I can only claim to know. Inert demons looking for their horns in the lost and founds.

What we lose doesn't remember us. It wouldn't be lost if it did. Little lies wake me from this dream. Make the colors real again. Brittle claws scrape the pavement looking for obvious treasures.

I'm not there anymore. I just like going back to when it still hurt.

You can't be found until you've been lost.

I can't hear you as you talk with your porn. Droll tributaries concede to the mass of scattered skin. Broken. Absolved. Of sins bet too soft. I keep looking for victims and am always sad to find I am the only one left.

The ocean struggles to reach the sand. Devour the footprints left by errant lovers. I was wrong. Still am. Eyes of ink imagining men. Disguised in traces of the truth. Fragments of time too busy with mitosis to notice the deserts forming under the grass.

It doesn't take long to live. It takes much effort to love. Until we attempt to combine those two paradoxes.

Her heels were sharper. Sharper than she was. Wooden syringes in veins made of concrete. Like I could feel. Or ever have. Your heavens interrupted. Your bald gods with their bent tails.

Still telling their stories. The blank page my purgatory. The sky raining down upon us in thick leaves. As if I'd ever listened. To anyone other than myself.

Saviors still sharpening their pencils for the test that isn't ours.

Every answer uncovering more questions.

For the time being, this is my god.

Lost. Daring eyelashes at the bottom of the basin. Bottles. Extinguished like so many birthday candles. Wishes that don't come true. Made in the camouflage of faces we assume to recognize.

Sparse anemia's. Toy with the the cure. The basis of disease being weakness. Or otherwise the delusion of strength. From fractured hands to broken ears. The song resolves itself regardless of my involvement. I'm just there.

Lost.

Cut grass turning brown on a busy sidewalk.

Immunity arrives in parts. Jugs of sleep to drink too much of. Threats of vaccine in every lust.

Lost.

Dirty footprints stolen from the darkness. Quenches cherries still ripe enough to remember what is gone.

Turn over your tulips. Address the roots. Bold fingers stab at the stillness with sharp fingernails. Seeds huddled under the dirt imagine what the sun is. As children must imagine god. Big yellow suns for eyes amused by our long, messy births. The blood is a measure. Distracted scale weighs the shadows in the picture. Petrified ghosts rejoice as the frame is shattered. She only requires the negatives. Constructing lifetimes out of Popsicle sticks. No glue. Just the residue to sure the structure. I'm only familiar with flowers in the fact that they exist. Don't send me any unless you wish them dead. I was toying with the concept of starvation. Tasting the last breath . Rolling it around on my tongue like some expensive chardonnay. The sour of decision evident. In so many careless strokes. Bored with the easy lie she moved onto more complicated variations of the same truth. Here is your cake. Just don't eat it.

Pictures in the numbers cry out calmly. Splitting tongues with thick teeth. Molars. Tongues. Giant spoons sop up the leftovers after the prey is gutted. I don't even see them. Shadows on the ceiling trying to convince me they were there.

Giant mounds of bone and muscle suffocating tiny breasts. Spoiling holes with too much skin. Turning these empty spaces into waiting graves.

The atoms in each breath colliding with theirs. Minor explosions that leave me defeated. Eyes like dice tumbling. All numbers. No faces. I want to be whole, but not like this. Cunning victims turn the predators into prey. So that they never know they're being eaten.

Grandma in her bed impersonating the wolf. Teaching me to be suspicious of everyone. Little lies numbed. Saved by the spider. To chew on later.

Just meat. Food. For someone else. Lopsided storeies they'll tell to someone else.

Ignore the trial. Focus on the jury. They will decide your guilt. Seduce the judge. Convince him to let you go. Rememeber what you don't know.

The mime laughing at all we haven't heard.

I can live with what I don't know, but not with what I'll never learn.

There is god enough for me in the folds of skin that separate penis and vagina. Too much really. Angels in their broken songs pretend to know failing people. Rubbing their white wings with the bloody rags of broken bones. Silly sacks of skin pedalling too fast on treacherous highways. Red, red lips no one has licked for so long. Darwin laughs from his grave as I attempt a funeral for what he referred to as evolution.

No one was there when I noticed the truth accepting bribes. I had no camera the first time that I saw life bargaining with death. I didn't have a pencil when I saw god for the first time. Big fat liar that he is. A bunch of men playing behind curtains at consoles to complicated. A wolf trying to disguise its fangs.

Severed arms. Red capes. Empty picnic baskets.

Salvation enough.

For the colorblind.

Handcuffs on her dress. Ratcheting tight on her vagina. She claimed she always crossed her legs, but he knew better.

Examing her throat for indications of words not said. The tick of her lips quitetly counting off to the explosion. He was already digging. Arranging the jump in his head. Full of numbers multiplying too rapidly. Nine hundred ninety nine steps to the edge. The square root of zero is nothing. She counted the seconds until the seconds grew bored of her. Driving nowhere. Chasing the moon as it chased her. In a marathon of words all aborted. The mathmatics of second chances is that there are none.

Heroes in thick glasses wishing cellphones hadn't been invented.

Even he did it all to save himself.

Lucky for us he never did.

Save us.

Fathom the darkenss. Calculating eternity. In glimpses of stars long dead.

What I can't hear. In the pauses between the rain. Gnawing on doll's feet. Minor provisions for the blind. The deaf. The dumb. Gods in plain clothes on corners too dark to see. Their faces as they thank us.

What I can't see. Revisions. In thrusts of charcoal. Men. Layers of soot. Dirty chimney. Keeps the smoke in. Bad lies still coming back to challenge the poverty of fallen bridges.

I can't hear them, but I know what they're saying.

Forgotten dogs trying to run on three legs.

Bad dogs. Tails still wagging. Bad dogs. Little women.

Looking for old leashes.

All this breathing. It's insidious. Rape the teddy bear to spare the semen. Ejaculation frescoes glimmer in the shadow on her molting skin.

You're changing, he said. You can't wear that anymore. It's too big. It's too small. You don't want to be found. You want to be discovered. You're a fossil. A fragment of bone in the dirt wondering what it feels like to have skin. Or even be a part of a skeleton. Structure. And whole playing their monopolies in red hotels. Sensible lies that make it easier to fall asleep.

I don't want gardens. Or flowers that only appear when the weather is temperate. I want deafness. Dead things. And lost words. Ghosts confident enough to scare us.

You can't be born knowing. You must learn. Through process of elimination. The names of each of those teddy bears. The color of the shit in their underpants. The reason it's still there.

I can't hear you, she advised. I haven't heard anything since we took off our clothes.

So many drugs from which to choose. I can't decide.

Her thicker ear tried to hear. The doubtful discussions of gods on steroids looking for heavier weights to lift. Or at least, that's what she thought they said. Her good eye focused on seeing. Her weak one trying to look to like it wasn't. Hunters with harps strumming the kill.

Her t-shirt was hungry and her pants were too busy throwing up to notice that she wasn't wearing either of them.

Anymore.

Sex like sticky notes filling her free spaces. Bald daggers stab at the missing hairs on her skin. The tumor of hope growing larger. Her spine shrinking in comparison.

The truth. A drunken surgeon. Cutting madly to save her.

Unprepared she examined the questions. Licking the discarded candy wrappers he referred to as his balls. Bits of sugar plumping her tongue. In patches of neatly trimmed pubic hair. The clown was standing there. So obviously expecting a blowjob. Squeezing. Contorting his balloons into less chaotic animals.

The butter was melting. Like children too young to be born. The little bit of sickness in every vaccine they give us. We're only immune because they've already infected us.

The clock was waiting. Drawing stick figures with the verbs. Portraits with the adjectives. Tracing cliffs. In black marker. Numbering the pages from the last to the first. Little blizzards removing the raods from our journey. Partial adverbs runing close to the hem. Huge people in tiny moments. Like everything we tell ourselves is true.

Short skits on long legs. A fraction of what I remember about being a woman. The whole of what I learned from it.

Pink jeans that were too tight. Barking, snarling dogs filling her bed. Pictures. Proof. She was. Is defective. Swimming in leaches. Wearing the parasites. It's a fashion statement.

I don't see what you do.

Blood lies. Pushes us apart. Pink jeans. From sears. Husky girl's size. Still too tight. Push down the pockets. Suck in her stomach. Grab the rivet with both hands. Find a way to fit.

Or be a child. Cry. Be scolded. Pick up the addiction early. Become an expert. Angry santa claus on the roof. Cookies on the ledge. Don't eat them.

It's just a trade off. One habit replaces the next. Food. Hate. Drug. Falling dominoes to stand up all over again. Little girls in fuzzy photographs. Unaware of the world. Or how much it wants of them.

Cheat sheets for daddy still don't take care of mom. She was young and unhappy then. She made me wear pink jeans that didn't fit. She wrote letter on her pillow to the men she'd lost and the children she'd aborted.

I used to try to imagine my other siblings. Or prteend they were in my place instad. The little truths of liars more than enough. Armless bartenders pouring loud beers for the deaf. It wouldn't matter. None of it is real until you're standing inside the pink jean that don't fit.

The hen took off its beak. Curious she thought, that it remained so red removed from the face. The color she reasoned came from blood and cells. Molecules fermenting in a stew of bacteria. As all living things are.

With purpose she cataloged the derelict expressions his face dared to churn forth. In minutes mediocre. In abridged equations of the theory of man. Lying never suited him unless it suited his agenda. The truth was whatever he had decided of it.

Take your clothes off she pleaded. Violently urgent to know. What of him she could still touch amongst all the moments she'd imagined. It was real, he begged. As real as you wanted of it. The geese were shot. The dogs retrieved their carcasses. We cooked the meat. We chewed it.

How it tasted was your decision.

We can't go back. That would change everything. Still we must have. Because it's all different than I remember. At least this version of me. The crab grass is darker. The rainbows come less frequently. I dream in black and white, instead of color. The mice shit less.

He was a question. In every sense of the word. Essays on insecurity proliferating at every turn of his head. Where was I? I don't know. Somewhere near enough to observe, but too far away to know.

Skin like detergent washing away the dirt. Touch like bleach. Devouring the colors of moment. People like chewing gum bursting between my teeth. Sticky faces and dead cells trying to manage a lifetime of experiences. Hollow conversations pouring like liquid plastic into molds that would make them fit only after they had happened.

Perhaps it always was. Or maybe it will never be. I can't know that until I find my way back to before we were.

If I could travel time. If I may ever have. No one knows. Until it happens. And then they forget by the time it does.

If I could go back. Stop this life before it gets to where we are now. If I could go back, why would I. If I'd been successsful there'd be no reason. Nothing to go back and fix.

Nothing changes. Or can be changed. Nothing except what we want from it.

Don't take your face off just yet. You've barely grown into it he said. Thoughtlessly. Measuring the distance between skin and bone as he would ingredients for any stew. Leftovers. A poor man's feast. Ice cream sundaes in a power outage. Taste me now or I become your poison.

She was wearing a nightgown she knew had been worn before. By several women previous. Laying in the same bed. Next to the same stranger. Gurgles of an uneventful paradox broiling in her uterus. What happens. What has. Tolling in her chest. Marking each hour as it happens. As it always had happened. Be she in her own time or theirs.

See how this one fits, he offered. Uninterested. The scars make your frown less intrusive. The rabbits won't fuck anymore. And you're partially the reason. Nothing is ever born in this world without a pretense. Without facades. Ones that fit better than yours does right now.

And now, after all, is all we have left. We left the future behind. We've forgotten the past. Now is all that's left to determine if we'll ever be again.

The dogs were sleeping quietly on the back porch. The moonlight grooming what was left of their barks. Warnings to strangers to keep their distance. At least, the obvious ones.

By the time she'd gotten back to herself it was too late. She already knew, but was still determined to go there.

Words enough. Wouldn't you say? Choices. Dying lightning bugs in my jar. I can see it the dark if I have to. Or I can be blind if that is what I want.

The trigger in the seat of her pants. Longing to be squeezed. The bullets in the bend of her thighs. Hoping to penetrate.

Time with its hot cattle prod pushes the hours forward. There are no cowboys anymore. To coral the strays. Nothing to spur the steeds to run. No needles to fat with sacrifice to mend this fraying skin.

The tabloid of touch is all we have now. While I stare up at stars I can no longer name.

The lie has a certain grace when at last you realize the lie is all you have. Stale Saturn's tease the moon. The moon bullies the stars. Until all these clothes are useless. The kaleidoscope of touch bends. Breaks what we were. Into pieces small enough to swallow.

The disease makes us better. If we can allow it.

The irony of flightless birds finally makes sense.

Dead things. I know about them. The spark of streetlight just before the sun rises. The dirt from the well right before the water rushes. The pea tormenting the tired princess as she laments her lack of princes.

Dead things. Loud songs playing softly. Children pretending to be asleep when the bedroom door opens.

Drawing the pictures chases away the words. Broken bottles struggle to hold onto a dwindling illusion of escape. Dead things shift under their dirt. Sleep comes in the rapid intervals between breathing and screaming. Dead things. No one hears them when they say they are alone.

Dead things. All their open cages prevent them from being saved.

Paper planes. No breezes. I'm a fortunate zombie. The hunger still hasn't arrived. It never will if I can hurry.

Chewing gum. No teeth. The dead things count themselves while the living aren't looking. Heaven comes in strobe lights. Hell comes in footprints.

Snow. Dead on the road. It's never cold enough to hear. To ask them why they fall when there's no place left to land.

Dead things. Remembering us. Old clothes that no longer fit.

We are leaving. Headlights staring in my window. Autopsies on movement. We are leaving. We just have nowhere to go.

It's the truth. Albeit a disputed one.

Long branches twist the sunlight into knots. All we get are punches. Glass doors wearing people like condoms. Revolving until everything is said without a sound.

It's a lie. These pieces of skin on my plate looking like people looking for names I can't remember. Watches not keeping time. Not our time together. Or apart. The anguish of the universe. That it can't subtract. It must keep expanding until we are all alone.

Time digests and expels us. We nourish it. We make it sick. Until our disease is its only sustenance. Our only desire is to live. Our only purpose is to die.

Vomiting up each other in perfect meter, but flawed rhyme. Adding to these heavy skins.

I dreamed my cactus died. The pot fell over. A sneeze of dirt and ceramic opened up its concealed grave. It had no roots at all. No life inside it.

But it's falling revealed a discovery. Underneath it another. Bigger. Greener. Sharper still.

Always on the surface the dead thing.

Underneath it.

Life.

Cardboard statues in the rain.

It's a lie. That's true, but it's a truthful one.