God had the pistol in his hand. He fired, but missed. Ending everything in 'a whimper, not a bang'.

I could love the world. I really could. If it could love even one of us. Who toils to make the things that make others rich.

Life is not a poem. And all the poets are dead. Made useless by mortgages and credit.

The world has no use for things that can't be sold.

And I, little use for it.

Feed me my disease in tired payments. Tell me I'm better while it gets worse. Kittens in the barrel. To drown. Claws out. Scratches everywhere. Drugs. Always with the drugs. To take away the one disease. Discover a dozen new ones.

Buy me. I'm for sale. Save me. I've already taken so much. The world is ended by the old. When there are more old than young. The world isn't ending. Right now. But it's looking in Darwin's direction.

I'm tired of paying for actors and athletes to eat caviar while other's starve.

Dismantle the system. Start over. With new charlatans.

The attic is no place to play he warned her as she gathered her stairs. What do men know of dolls in dark places she asked him. As she pulled the string on the naked bulb. More than I do. And so much less. She answered herself. Different shadows. Same lack. Of seeing what is there. The light too strong. For blind hands. I wish I had never turned it on.

Then I would still know nothing. And nothing would still know us.

In soft beds. Full of dolls' eyelashes. She examines. The particles that are missing from the mass. Whispers of god in the science of men. High dungeons in the execution of skin. As we try it on. Only to find. That it doesn't fit.

The years expire in fits of touch. The illusion of collision still testing my resolve. The smaller parts of the atom finding the universe still too small. The continuum collapses and I wonder how I ever crossed a bridge that small.

Inside our attics. We could look out the short windows and pretend the world was small enough to grasp.

But those men always had other plans.

The god in his penis didn't feel very omniscient. Molecules. Stick figures of people. I can't draw at all. Nor erase. Big pages. With nothing written on them. Children in their father's clothing. Discussing pain in doses of medicine. Pain is the only place where life really makes sense. These dead seeds grow into monsters we're more than happy to have devour us.

The hours search for each other. Lost in these labyrinths of skin. Time is the victim of people. A prisoner of the intricate equations we claim are love. There is sight. Even for the dolls with their eyes plucked out. They see.

The empty dormitories that darken her eyes. The little weights they add to the scale to make her small again. Choosing the dead. The ambulance chirping in her chest. Save us.

Time comes in broken frequencies. Black ink I can hear writing. Useless words. Skin I can find after any man is gone. The smallest pieces of us create the biggest bang.

What I want to wear. A light dead before I ever saw it. Eliminating the flesh. Taking away the god. All we are left with is a world. That knows nothing. of who we are.

The world is often loud. Arrogant piss accusing the toilet of various conspiracies. I am usually quiet. When I can be. When the rain allows. The waiting comes in so many colors. I can't decide. They think the mistakes I made are me. They are wrong.

The atoms colliding. Quite effortlessly. The bus stopping to let us off. Going. Always going someplace.

We've never been.

The weather toils to wake us. In loud thunderstorms. The world almost ends. Saved by thieves and perverts. She takes off her gown. The wolf has stopped huffing. The photons have ceased emitting. Their hints at what we might see.

The child in cold pajamas wakes up. In his soiled underwear. Certain the world is too close. Or nearing its end. The cat smiles. Too wide to believe. The mirror goes farther than I thought it would. The staircase leading us up. In spoiled gumdrops of when.

The wrapper mattered.


The world slowly opens its jaws. Chewing. On empty baskets. Grandma in her patrimony loses to the fangs. I wish I could take off my shoes and walk through this sand. The edge of the world my defense. But it's out there. It's different. Better. And no one cares.

I'd rather be a communist than a patriot.

I'd rather be a woman than the man she had to forget.

Isn't that what life is. A series of tornadoes punctuated by the snickers of the broken men.

The dark orchard of then obscured her mouth as she pulled out her straw. The fountain of red that is life spilling over the rim of her lips. Too many eyes she muttered as the world slumbered. Content with broken locks and fallen stars.

They're soaring she insisted. Not falling in the least. To no one in particular.

When comes in glasses too tall. For even the saddest among us to drink. Stiff condoms clinging to the waste basket. Heads of dolls scour the floor for their missing bodies. I don't know what to want. Or if there is anything left like that.

The hours vex in fibrillated ejaculations. wake up they say. taste the poison.

swallow it.

Trust us they say. the ladders at the back of her throat. Each rung collapsing under the weight.

of so much want.

I had forgotten my own lies. In favor of empty rooftops. To sleep upon. Pull the darkness down from its cradle. Imagine the lid coming closed. On this foul pot of skin and bones. Had named each moon after the manner of its death. Unimaginably large masks falling from the sky. Landing in pinholes.

Pressing the cigarette to her lips she formulated a scenario. Tomorrow in deep breaths. Mouths wide open. Eyes closed. Memory manipulating the skin. Until every wounds is certain. It will never heal.

Affairs with bandages. Leave her bloodier than she began. Still she wears them. Hoping to be infected. By a better disease.

Her eyes like a camera. See nothing except the pictures. Frozen images of a world that moves much faster than she can. She closes the door. She breaks the lens. Only to herself more.

The flower falls. The petals wither. And she takes credit. For whatever french movie she's trapped herself in. The house blows down. The wolf is fed. A fairy tale she assumes. Until she slices open its belly. To find her time machine still ticking inside its intestines.

The dead man in her flesh. Insisting. There is still time enough.

to change.

Unplugging the clock she made note of the hour. She would have to be back to it before long. She saddled up the angels and quickly took off. Heaven she knew was always tomorrow. Hell always yesterday. She had decided somewhere between would be the place.

Searching for the wolf she encountered the fox. A wisp of a killer. A cunning bit of prey. Just like this travel is. Both hide and seek. The world in downpours. Thunder. Gods choking on our arrogance. Their throne ours to take.

Crossing the river she found the hare. Anxious to race. Admitting it would win, she convinced it to show her where the race would end. The moment was prepared for my breach. The door was already open. As I walked into the empty room. And found the window broken.

Looking out. The world in cuts of skin. Scabs like liquor proliferate the man. In fits of ego he would surely die without.

The princess. Sleeping on her pea. All a dream. Pandora peering inside that box. Everything about to change, but now is all she can see.

Time travel isn't a machine. There is no on or off. We come to these intersections on broken shins. We crawl away from them in splints.

I have seen the future. Luckily it hasn't seen me.

William Tell with the arrow pointed at the head of his child. William Tell me how meaningful the apple is.

Pale dramas angle his face. Her stubbornness bisects his cheeks. Hard triangles butt the circle, but cannot break in. She wears the bed in layers. Long sequences of calculation that tell her where she is. was.

going.

the memoir of a word on each eyelid. Eyes stay open. So no one can see. What she's said. the voice on the page whispers that they're all lying.

She undresses. In fits of insomnia. The hours counting her. Forward and back. No ends. Just telling the dark to wait. Come back again later. When her pockets are empty.

And these linens are clean.

It would be obvious. That I had been gone. The missing wrinkles in his brow. The dark half full. With speculations about how I found myself after all our years apart. The ladder in his stare assuming I would be tempted. To go that high.

Falling as well as I do.

In my search.

For the bottom.

The manger between her breasts blossoming. The comic book in his pants blaming the audience. For all this quiet. His grin an accordion. Choking on its own tired dance.

The spectrum asks us. Are the colors there? Who sees what. How many colors are there that we can't.

He barfs long and proud. Sick with people. Shadows paint the walls in shades of dark. He counts the nothings.

I could bend the ladder. Climb it all backward. See it as though I had never been there. The psychic fetching her eyes. In distant rumbles of knowing why everyone has forgotten.

The perforated page. Waiting to be torn.

The devil turns his watch back. Hours before I knew it mattered. The whole world has imagined us. Not as we are, but as we could've been. A name for this poison that cures us.

Monsters and gods overlapping. Monsters and men. negoiating how.

They differ.

Wolves test their fangs against this stone. As hungry as I am. There is no blood.

The road was closed. The bridge was open. She hadn't dreamed in years about anyone other than herself. The world was narrow. The light was distant. She never slept. Just closed her eyes and imagined forgetting. All the things she can't.

Call the auction. Tell them I've a bid to place. A large one. On a million tiny moments I wish I still owned.

Groom the villain. Prepare him for his closeup. I'm ready to name names. Set her tits on fire. Shame the world into seeing. All the people they never notice. Combing the wolf. Choking the deer. In our volatile portions of the forest. The thinning trees. No longer obscuring. A failure of triumphs.

Turning the ignition on this worn out time machine. Eclipses of skin change the dirty diapers of men. Going everywhere. In only an instant.

Being everywhere at once. As Einstein always dreamt.

I have everything and nothing. In my precious time machine.

Its only flaw is that I don't know how to stop it.

The fly remains in the amber. The man remains in his clothes. Closer to god by the indignities of wealth.

She takes off her clothes. To fool them. Into thinking she is lost. The empty plastic skull. Holes. Blackened eyes whispering their secrets.

She had made revisions. Broken bones heal slightly askew. She had counted the distance. Between men. And determined. Keeping the bad ones was better. Than looking for the good.

Talking to the dogs. Arguing with the rabies. The infection warms her. In ways that they never could.

Maybe it's better to die like this than to live that way.

She wasn't born. The molecules collided she tells them. How she got here. She doesn't know. Except that god isn't to blame.

Anchors released. Apes on the verge of clothes. She's old. The smell of grandma. Mothballs and stray cats. Waiting without an alarm. To wake up. Dying is easy. She watches. Certain they are the fortunate ones.

It was pretty she said. As the moon smothered the sun. I can't see it, but I imagine that's how the world began. Blind and without knowing where it would end. I had my shoes in the doorway. Full of rain. And grass. Like I had been places.

I had been practicing. Knowing what is was like. To be a man. Soiling the atom. Waiting for the tears.

To concede her.

The life falling from her fists in beads of sweat. A tentative hold on nothing in particular. A sealed box. Containing some poison and a subject. Theoretically both alive and dead.

Just like everyone always is.

The bird in her hand was regurgitating. Convulsing with the rhythm of starvation. Trying to feed. The atrophied bones of junkies. Men without skin. Searching for holes to crawl inside.

She heard him say hello. Then she was deaf. Smothering in the world within. The words were limping. Thundering stumps pursuing their missing feet. Greyhounds chasing mechanical rabbits they'll never catch.

Crawling. As if there is a path. The vein spreads its legs. Lets her inside. The fable convinces her to keep looking. For the end.

The whore building her brick house. Is hard to knock down. The wolf breathing heavily Fails its threat. She is not afraid. Of the world that would prove she is still asleep. Has always been. Even after the kisss of that prince. The fairy tale betrays her expectations. The flood arrives just in time to take it all away.

All that she tries to remember forgetting her. Haggling as she does with the darkness for one more chance to purchase what cannot be bought.

Picking at the future. Chewing on the scabs. Until there is blood.

The flesh is an insatiable machine. The heart is an empty grave.

I say the words. They say us. In vain flatteries. Dead pursuits. The liar is half right. The god is excuse enough. Only for some. Alone comes in downpours. I don't drown. I float. Like all garbage does. Telling the world my secrets in portions of drug. The wolf. The pigs. Arranging punctuation.

I can't hear you. I don't' know what you want. But I must assume it's more than you're willing to give. The science of the demon triggers the calculation. Too close. Too far.

I let them fool me. I turned on the time machine. And waited for the future to come.

But It never did.

The monster has always lived there between her thighs. She'd just never bothered to name it. The other hers from different futures sat. Sipping diet cola and debating the conundrum of how they had come to exist. Clearly uncertain that they actually did.

She had moved the island. That utopian purgatory that had made them so strong. She had moved everything. But it was all just where it began. They just couldn't see it. Shoe laces undone. As they ran. Not falling. Just collecting missteps.

The atom dances on the verge of time. Calm and erratic as it determines where this flesh will fall off. What bones will be left. The skeleton jokes. The molecule is only a guide. The blood is only the wishful thinking of dying men.

Who have lost everything else that matters.

The monster is deaf. These scabs say nothing.

The ugly is as close to me as they've ever come. Undressed dolls with their hair bitten off. Turning your karma against me. I'm old. Bitter. Useless. The window like a knife. Stabbing through always torn curtains. I could see. If I wanted to know. How hopeless it is. Trying to hate what I love. Or convince myself to choke on it.

The liars have the advantage. Always have. It's not as if I was counting. It comes. It goes. No one notices. The dinosaurs gone extinct in her bed. Penises like tampons. Content to sop up the blood.

I'm sure that it's over. And that it's only just begun. I flirt with the doll's torn hair. Biting down. Chewing. To swallow the foul. Steal what I can from the grave. Listen. As the corpse keeps talking. Assuming there was a plan. A place to go afterwards.

Etcetera.

The flesh is water. The heart is drowned in it.

Pieces swim. As if I can't recall. How far I was. From everything.

Mucous filled tissue exploiting my weakness.

Funerals in abundance. The dead busy themselves with burying each other. While the living just wait. For something to change.

No ghosts nor bald dolls bother to tell them. That it never does.

I can't go back from here. To change it. If I did get back and changed it there never would've been a reason to go back to in the first place.

I can't smell his distance. Like I used to through all this foul. The decay. Sad men steering their broken time machines. Time.

The way he weight it everything is too heavy.

Terminals at the back of her neck collide with lazy atoms. The slick of dead words coat her throat. Brief orgasms spoil the light. The last of her clothes submitting to the darkness.

It's over. As abruptly as it began.

Bits of sleep in the guise of man. Go to sleep. Shaky bridges tempt me to cross an ocean of skin.

Fingers like cellophane. Dimpling. Singing their cacophonous lullaby.

I don't sleep.

Eyes closed is time machine enough. Atoms smashing. Still looking for where it begins.

It's enough to go back. Make it all impossible again.

The demons calm enough. Sour men expecting angels. After their bouts with heaven.

One could say the bomb dropped. Long before I had the chance to go back. And change the inevitable.

One could say the man was a fool. For letting such a woman escape. If one could say such things matter. After we've discarded those skins.

Sex. Elaborate jokes. Where the I am the punchline.

What matters? What doesn't?

How can I contend that anyone matters. After I've talked with the quarks. Gods. Men. How can I determine the difference?

When all are too small to see.

High enough. Flightless birds tumbling from the nest. She looked just like her father as she sad it didn't matter. Over arrives. In colored parcels. Of melting ice. The dye bleeds. Useless without its skins. The monsters roar. Not so scary without their teeth.

It's just words. Accompliced by skin. Misguided misanthropes erecting unstable Edens. Atoms erupting in relapse at the prospect of recovery. Dead men punching the clock. Trying to stop what can never be.

Fingernails on the chalkboard. Her little dresses. Telling the lies she never would. Assuming the truth would catch up.

Too much faith in atoms. Convinced the past is somewhere still far away from where she's been.

Otherwise why bother. If the her future is men.

The universe. In short stabs. The drug is only as good as you are to it. The world. Paste on her fingers. Sticking to everything she touches. Philosophers in her pantyhose. Taming the wilds of her skin with long division.

Hate me. I can deal with this.

Love me and I'm lost.

Or at least I imagine I would be under the circumstance.

He catches the hours as they fall into his lap. Dirty kittens. Their claws not under their command. He notices her. In bouts of decision. A puppet. Tangled up in the strings that once made her dance.

She whispers to the catastrophe. In lazy electrons. That time is travelling us. Not the other way around.

She admits. Maybe I have been there. That imaginary place. The fortunate call happiness.

Maybe I was there. Once. And it didn't know what to do with me.

The man was picking at the lock. Searching for the key she'd swallowed. The mud in her underwear. Smudges of cunt fracturing eager kings. Short dialogues on why it's over.

Wake up dear, he whispered. In cold ions. Trips of hydrogren too far from the clock. Long shadows trace the journey not taken. Time takes. Doesn't give. The future finds us. In hiccups of then.

Time, she giggled. It doesn't listen.

My love, he said. When you're ready to hear I will tell you. All the things I've never said.

That's a beautiful promise. Still I've heard it before. Too often.

Stumbling strangers. Convinced they know. Where I have been.

Tucking into the time machine. Pirates. Cheated by their treasures.

have an opinion on which of my poetry is best, saddest, something to the superlative?

let me know. i'm really not fit to compile this list.

Nebulas and Continuums
Long movies at the back of her throat. Silent ones. In black and white. The dialogue of demons unheard. Yet obvious.

Nausea
Life is always ready to happen. That you are the vessel is irrelevant. Life will happen with or without our consent.

Conversations with Men
Silly girl, he said. You, with your eyes sewn to the back of your head. How do you see where you're going?

Click the titles to read the whole text.

suggestion from holly archer:

The Weight of Empty
It was a quiet rain in a loud storm. It was humble kind of sex. Like bitten nails. Half painted.

suggestions from flysamutha:

Year to Tinker With
He grew old overnight. I guess everyone does. Time puts us to bed with a thumb. Wakes us up with a fist.

Embalming
Time is agile and stubborn. Underwear still smelling of transient debates with touch. It says it knows, but I don't think it does.

Orla chooses:

Years to Tinker With
He grew old overnight. I guess everyone does. Time puts us to bed with a thumb. Wakes us up with a fist.

Weightless
Seasons at her back. The weather in long trenchcoats. Loosely covering her. Derisively letting in the cold. She breathes in long division.

The zoom on the lens. Touch. The catalyst. Fermenting. In docile ignorance. Love is arbitrary. Poker hands. Betting on the dealer's threats.

I don't think I have ever been. Close enough to heaven. To know whether or not it might exist. The ratchet clicks. Deviations. The future pretends to know who we are becoming.

The fairy tale between her legs tells of princes. But her underwear tells of plain men. Teasing swords too dense to pick up. The cavern opens to low moons and thick forest. She says.

That's the way it is.

Love comes with a stopwatch. I run too slowly.

Caution is the traitor. She works her breasts. As any woman would. Like steam engines barreling through barren landscapes. No stopping. No waiting for passengers. Just the scenery. Distant mountains of dick. Dimpled with unripe cum. Bad men on their best behavior. Rogue time machines coax a smile from bitter lips. The hacksaw in the growing folds of his skin. Begins to cut. It goes away. And comes back again. So abruptly. Missing pieces do the math. The remaining ones build the apparatus.

Travelling time is easy. It's the getting back to where I started that puzzles me.

The fountain at the back of his neck. Spewing. Victims. Old pennies lost in too many wishes he'll never grant. Old women. The scrape of pantyhose coming off without permission. Old men. Soft men. In thick casts. Pretending to be broken.

Time heals her in ways unexpected. The future arrives in gobs of phlegm. And she shallow each without ever thinking about the consequence.

All that sickness working its magic in the many dormitories of her skin. The relentless ambivalence of liars. A stubborn and cruel friend.

Tomorrow on the rim of the glass. Yesterday in the seam of her dress. As she discards it for truths far less ambiguous.

Lost old men. Their meaty skeletons pointing out the whores. Lonely men. Their thirsty cocks confounded by a sea of women.

Sometimes he hates himself. When that is the easier task. The freedom of failure is something to consider.

Sometimes he hates them. The callous world at large. The sluts and scabs of pussy that dare demand his worship for such limited pleasures. Bleed. Do it. Bleed some more.

She says, stay alone. You're better off. And so am I. This mutual disease usurps us both. And I know very well, lies when I hear them.

It's only sad because you are. It's not my fault. It's only dark because the earth is anxious. To keep spinning. And here I am stuck on it. Foolish enough to think anyone else is.

I'm always left with this stone in my fist. I'd throw it, but I'd break myself if I did.

The trouble with time is that it doesn't travel fast enough. Old women. Old men. Still children to us.

He's as ugly as I remember. And as handsome.

Open the buckle. Ignoring stuck zippers. What she wants isn't there. Never was. Turn down the scream. To a whisper. Black holes. Catapults of flesh. Launch the victims like weapons. Tempests transport these fictions to places where they still don't matter.

The socket wrench. Chugging against her grin. The future in adjectives. Cheap admissions of want. I use them too often. The past in verbs. There farther back I travel the more it becomes obvious. I never left. It's just physics. Not that complicated. Once you remove your skin. Then we're all just chaotic atoms looking for an empty container.

Cold fusion.

It happens.

Too often.

And these small containers are too big again.