Patterns. Maggots in the dream. Absolve the flesh. Science. Vultures snatch away. Each evolution. Science inside. Turning good meat into carrion. Vultures. With long necks. Reaching deep. To scoop out our innards. Though we're only close to death.

The science. Of Waiting. Sneaking our lives away. Picking at. The thin scabs. A garnish of gauze. A gravy of blood. An Imagined feast that doesn't come.

The dream. The science of want. In hot bursts of bulbs. Left on too long. We grab the dark ones. To change them. Unaware of how hot they still are.

The manner. In which I choose them. The lies I'd like to believe. There is a process. Culling the weak branches. Sorting the soot from the ashes. Subtleties impossible to explain.

The physics of when. How deep. The conundrum of if. I pulled the correct lever. Am I where I belong. Or just somewhere all failed experiments end up. Am I the snake that spoiled Eden. Or just the girl who was foolish enough to trust him.

Flicking the switch to off I wait. For a sign that I've gone anywhere. The numbers change, but these bodies take time to catch up. I confess. To the windows. That I thought more would be different. I hate the rain. It never listens to me.

Doubt. Stoic barometer. Futile prison. Leaving. In long drags on stale cigarettes. The scale. Focus arriving in antes. Lost wages. Cold toes. Betting on the end. The stray dog. Knocking over our garbage cans. We had so much. We could throw most of it away.

The scripts. Odious tragedies. Warts on our tongues. Make it impossible to say.

The dogs. Urgent with the instinct. To hunt. Barking. Starved for an opportunity to kill. The transparency of death fucks up her time machine. It's neither there nor here. Keeping careful track. The world could never understand. That the future shapes the past. Their lives are only wagers. Coins in a slot machine bigger than the god's we've guessed.

I just wait for the walls to cave in. Only they never do. I look for myself. I find her, but she never believes me. When I try to tell her. We've been there. It's already over.

Just flesh. Falling off quietly. Until I can identify the bones.

Tearing open. Skin like wrapping paper. The first of many gifts. Sucking on. Tits like calculators. Square roots of zero again. Adjusting the manifold. To compensate for trajectory. Resistance. Bitten fingers on the go button. The maggots in her throat hatching. Flies for the words. Bits of soap and paper towel in the corner of the room.

Nervous epiphanies. The mouse's tail in the cat's claws. Culling the years in slivers of men. Going. Gone. The illusion of power that time portends to grant. In a heave of faith. A bloody stumble close to the entrance.

The tree. Too bright too see us. The doorway too wide to let us enter.

The patterns persist despite her denials. Paltry gods on the rim of our discontent. Kill their sons. In a deus ex machina. Desperate circles try to fit those squares inside themselves.

The hours lapse. Into unpleasant gypsies of touch. The nomad. The explorer. The dead man in all his bravado. Still fears the woman.

All this distance.

Takes me no further.

Felt hats on clay heads. Hands. Needles. Make us. Picking up each stone to see what was underneath it. An infinite ceremony of how dark can it get when you can't see. Full of monks also called condoms. And Satan's on anti-depressants. Cordial weddings on the quantum fold illuminate the momentum of lost men.

Half the quotient is just deciding where to begin. The pattern unfolds. In furies of touch. The same way all our lives began. Statutory and selfish bouts of pleasure. Rebelling against the chaos that is its source. The slut. On her awkward high heeled crutches. Falling down.

In fractions of when. Strangers were easier to know than herself. And bones broke only to awaken the muscles. Life came to us in pockets. Folding. Rich with scrapped skin cells and bathtubs. Dirtier because we'd washed ourselves in them.

Old t-shirts. Alive with broken graphics. Fierce. Missing letters. Tease. I can't remember the words I once wore.

Velocity. In contraptions like we are. When someone removes our underwear. The cogs exposed. The grease in the engine hot and sparse. The hum. Of dying motors. Writhing with potential places. To go.

As if a destination alone is excuse enough to call off the search for something more.

Playing with time. Exhausted rubber bands. Stretch only so far. Before they snap.

The bishop closest to the queen is taken. It's a necessary sacrifice. To win.

She wasn't there. The naked bulbs. Coyotes of skin hunting. The sick. The weak. Already dead. She wasn't unconscious when you put her into that coffin. Easy locks. And empty ovens. Calling the absent baker names.

I gave them what I could. Tomorrow. Like icicles. Melting. Ready to stab. As the frozen in undone. The winter in bursts. The device on high. And still we're here. The past takes us back, but the future is ambivalent. Cold soup. Heavy bowls. As she waits for the meat to cook.

The fragility of flesh. obvious in every meal. Hunger. Consumption. Just another addiction. Cracked plates. Useless pots. Still.

She dips the crayon into the flame. Daring the color to escape. Still. We always find a way to feed. The witch. Right before we shove her into the oven.

Taste the house made of candy. Count backwards. To determine the cost of the sugar.

Good men. Well, I wish I'd known some. But bad men are what entertain us.

Dressed to listen. To hear. The shiver of eager pennies as they fall. From the edge. The center is god. From the center it is the opposite. Saying things we can never do. Doing things we've never said. Tying knots in the moments. So no one can unravel. So no stray strand is our undoing.

The ant comes bearing a gift for the grasshopper. A crumb of food foraged. A pretentious lesson in stealing the right way.

Dressed to give almost anything. The outline of missing pockets on her ass. Sour road map to taste her tits. Lugubrious poetry of the empty glass. I don't need pockets anymore she shouted. I have nothing left to put in them.

No change to jangle as if I've been to the store. Discovered something I want. No traces of the drugs we did. Nor keys to give me access. To the cages we mistook for happiness. Just these fingers. Calloused fingers too short. That keep reaching. Always short of grabbing. The thing I thought I had.

We're only happy when we're broken. Alone and sure someone is to blame. We're only happy when there's something to pray for. Some devilish deity that holds our fate in his hands. And we spend the whole year waiting for the night when we can ask him. For what is it we want.

So that come morning we'll not have to hate ourselves. At least for this one day. Because once a year. Only just once. Nothing is our fault.

There was much to give. And more to take. As usual. The world. A stranger at her window. The orange at the back of her forehead. Asking. The yellow between her thighs. Knowing the answer.

The cold was adamant. She wore dresses when no one could see. A sad, three-legged Jesus knocking on their doors. Taking them off to prove. Life was simple. Love even simpler. And giving just taking what no one else wants.

Counting the raindrops. All dresses off. Following the rabbits as they consume their feces. Giving comes in stenches. Taking comes it vomits.

It doesn't matter. Either way I'm sick.

Isosceles wasn't listening. As we bored through the corners. Poor men. And rich ones. Eager to extrapolate their gain. From so much misfortune.

She was too busy with her lessons to know. That the recital had been cancelled. They could stall the rape, but not prevent it.

The tiger. It's claws useless. In the center of all these graves. What I can kill is already dead. So what do I matter. What shall I love now that no one cares for what I hunt.

The muted train tracks. Count the skins we have shed. Discarding saviors more talk than presence. Life happens. Nothing else does. We wrestle. With those zippers. That insist. We've always been naked.

We cower in our phone booths. So many capes to try on. Gravity belittling almost heroes.

We stare. Certain the eclipse will end. Will children found. And humanity not a miscarriage.

Light years measure the distance. Darkness measures all the rest.

Bad bridges spilled the landscape. She never got there. The mouse on its hind legs acting the wizard to her cat. Still got eaten anyway. It's just a dent in the ribs. This journey that you malign. It's not unique. Same bruises. Different places.

Paint the ghosts. Still can't see them. Mark the graves. Still can't find the dead. Hate the wind. For stealing. The things I didn't hold tight. But it's all my fault.

Name the hours. Tag them. So I can get back again. To where I was. Am. Empty flower pots. The soil swallows. Seeds I never saw.

Years later. Everything is bigger than I remember. Or I am so much smaller than I was then.

The lever hummed against the pull of gravity. It's just a machine she cautioned herself while punching in the numbers. Convincing the dark to listen with broken knobs and dead batteries. You could be travelling time. Or just imagining the dead still remember you.

Either way. You're lost. Left dancing to that dial tone as if you've never known anything else.

Teasing the crocodile in your nightgown with bits of skin. Hoping to be bitten. Just to prove there is still blood flowing under this cement. The hours are anonymous. As they strut into our lives on thick ropes of touch. Grabbing. Pulling at that thick goat's skin. Imagining the word in geometry. Squares and triangles shape the moments to fit my logic.

Falling down. Ledges never meant to last over swimming pools of if. It there has ever been a start. Or a possibility of an end.

I left the machine on too long. Woke up to so many of us. We charted the weeks we had glimpsed and decided we still didn't know where we were. So how could we leave? Someplace we'd never been.

There is only the first taste and the last. All the test is lies. There is the first. Long planks lead me to the water. Where I've already drowned. There is the last. Shit on my shoes. That is there no matter where I walk.

All the time I've travelled. Big men. And the little ones. Pockets in a long storm. The falls relentless. Smearing the ink. Into something almost legible.

I leave all those places. Not knowing. I was ever there. I rake those leaves. Into piles. Stubbornly ignoring the wind.

Clarity arrives in chokes. Stale bread manipulating intestines. Closer still. To drug. In the little words time uses to measure how far it is. Shitless again. The doorstep on her windowsill. Closing. The years in her throat counting backward until. It's that close again.

The past is easy to capture. Just wait. Don't listen at all. The future just as much so. Follow. Forget when they tell you to do so.

Limbs like scarecrows. Lips like plows. Kick the seed. Drop the soil. We barter with the devil. Because in our head he is everything we want. We build our houses in his kingdom. Because we know heaven is just a corner there. Truth is free. To go wherever it wants. But time is embedded in this flesh. This chaos we call intimacy.

Watching. From our tiny wonderlands. We're giants. We're dwarfed. Those doorways collapse. Looking in the mirror. Asking it where we are.

We're nowhere.

Coaxing the catalyst. This tumor called sentience digs ambivalent into sour bones. Skin ripples with colors like layers of paint. Applied to falling skeletons. I am patient. I wait for the specters. To save me from myself.

They do come. Eventually. But they are too late.

Trying the puzzle on in whittles of when. I submit my theorem. The triangle is isosceles. The angles are sharp. But the degrees always add up.

Wait. Feign that you know. Why it is so hard.

The doorknob breathless. The window deaf. Eyes out the table. Faces dense with moments that have yet to happen. When he travels in his machine how can it travel back with him. it didn't exist. Neither did he. Split the timeline. Wait for the past to catch up to us.

The cellar numbs. The walls ambivalent. Coax the gods from out of their dualities. Not there. nor here. Between those places where truth is self-evident. I disappear. gone for I know not how long. Into the fray of then. Where I never was. Nor can ever be.

So how? How do the people there recognize me?

Manipulating space on smaller levels than any dick can ever perceive. Labelling their purgatories. Past. Present. Future. Neutered adjectives scratch at the rain that falls so loudly.

What I can hear. It grows louder. But more distant.

When she was alone the chamber was pragmatic. Faster than light. Rushed enough. To beat the future to our palms. Escape that closing fist. When she was young naked seemed an easy task. Show them. The ugly of their assumptions. Pierce the cork. Drink. Lay the bear on its side. Like all the dead things we use to make us feel alive.

Naming the inanimate. In corroded containers the hungry call skin. The mortuary. Lover's call when. Torn gloves. Full bedpans. The dead asking far too many questions.

If we can go fast enough we can be there. Each hour. A zoo of men. Bargaining with their cages.

If we can move slow enough. Let time pass us by. Then we can wait. Convince this flesh that it will last long enough to save us.

From whatever is we are.

I was ready to wait. Count hard. As if I was just learning. How near. How far. The end can be. The math was sound. It's the touch that betrayed. The science of love.

I can steal that parchment. Douse it in that same acid test. But the color won't be changed again.

Lies are ink when you listen closely. Skin is canvas when you stretch it tightly. I get old. I have no art left to do. Except the people I can't forget.

The water runs through her shoes. Bits of sandpaper. In life's strangle on the when. It asks. When she kew. Or if she ever did.

I don't want to have known, but I do. The lazy gods that usher us closer to these barren heavens.

The men. The cold machines that have failed us. So often.

The old men like ice storms. Cripple the young. The darkness grieves for our flesh. That it keeps safe what only abuses it. We are each remembered by the shadows that we cast. On the future. On the past. Prisoners in our skin. Because pleasure dictates us.

I remember forgetting them. As much as can be dismissed. Empty rabbit holes. The hounds with their noses deep in the scent. Of dead things. Long chased. Never quite caught.

I always practiced. Reciting the end. Knowing it to be imminent. The drug fades. People are all we have left. Want. stubbornness. In assuming the world should let them have. What none us have earned.

All the time I speculate there is to traverse. I know there is no future. Only revisions of the past. Fat girls that will always be no matter the size of their clothes. Bitter men that will blame the people that they couldn't love for having broken them.

The cold in our throats. Stacks of bricks. Settling into the mortar. Faithless friends. Going back to them. Again and again. Searching for a future that was never there.

Hours. On the mark that was his sleep. Bald spider webs. Begging the fly. Warm. The broomstick up her ass. Educating foul pussies in the art of not listening. The camera. Lidless eye focused on the lonely man. Pity for him. But none for the lonely woman.

Bad stories everyone wants to read. Because alone is the new drug. It's all full. The well. The pennies. The wishes ignored. Stories told. Next to glasses of wine. Ropes hung too close to the dead man.

But how. How was I to ever save him?

That agitated porcupine. So much venom in his quills.

I waited for the chance to touch him.

Am still waiting. For those poisons to subside.

Moments. Or maybe years. Parable of skin. Telling their stories.

Two are dead. The rest have gone away. We sit. The three of us that remain. Quietly cutting our steaks. Sopping up the juices with stale heels of bread. Her absence apparent only to me. Our small feast so unlike the ones as a child I remember having attended.

Turkey soup. Fortified with gizzards. Stuffing sick with salmonella. Delicious diseases for everyone to eat. Sick with each other. In the best possible ways.

No chair empty. No burner unused. As she stirred. Her bland, bland soup. Organs and vegetables simmering for hours under the guidance of her heavy ladle.

Ticking off each year in a grim ceremony called family. Tasteless as ever. But always addictive.

The blood between us resisting. Biology a formality to be overcome. There was pie. And coffee. Dry turkey for everyone. It was a day. It was a year. It was an eternity. Everyone was there. No one was.

It was nothing.

As quickly as it came it was over.

All those people. I was expected to love.

Strangers again.

Down. Disparate decimals coerce the deaf oasis. Thumbs. Zippers burn her lips. As they open and close. So often. Bottoms. Loud equations culminate in gods furious with us for their impotence. The spider under the porch has no web. He waits. In the dark. For his victims to come to him.

Away. From the repetition of touch. The fraud of skin. That still contends we are not alone. In this kaleidoscope of temptations. Fractured shapes folding into one another. Just like all the lies I never told them. While we push all the pieces into the empty spaces where they won't fit.

There in a pair of numbers. The formula becomes apparent. Doubt. In healthy doses. Manipulates each equation. Until every answer is zero.

Then. She was all herself. And no one had touched her except to ask if she could ever be someone. Colors. Aspiring to fall as she did. Because. There gravity never mattered.

When. Donors. With fangs and flesh. Fuss with the amplitude. Aggravate the quarks. As they fuck. Forming molecules at random. Creating us. A million times in a minute. Reality is a symptom of dying.

Time fumbles with its crutches. Up a lifetime of stairs. Dirty doorknobs spoil to life. Without windows. Without glass.

I see nothing. I am. Not there. Weightless.

Like I was. When there was only one of us.

Or at least before gravity had discovered how heavy this skin is.

Bare walls. Sticks in the soil dreaming of roofs. Empty chairs in the hall. Remembering the press of broken bodies. Caught fish. Flailing for breath in this suffocating air. The clown with his face falling off. Frantically searching for more white. That huge wig weighing down his head. As he tries to look at her.

The after is the best place to feast. Dead things everywhere. Eyes toiling in the grim. Flesh is want to pursue. The stab of placebos smothered in this sickness. I never wanted to be saved.

This device called love fails us again. Excited molecules incite their riots below our skin. But touch is still a communist. And we still hate each other.

Her pajamas. Like locks on her legs. Determined to make it a race. Between time the dying machines.

His and hers. She allowed. Quietly she danced. The keyhole in her back tightening.

I am. Little fingers under your clothes. Touching places no one does. Rearranging scarred skin. To expose. Forgotten openings. I am. Blood. Hard that softens. Bones healed that still ache.

The pretty molecules of carbon that make your lips soft. The enzymes that foul your body while you sleep. I am free. Like you are. To ruin everything.

I am. The sweet kiss of sleep as it pretend to hear your dreams. The fantasy of feeling that each finger contends. As your body tells you different. The whimsy of gods forged in flesh. The euphemism of heaven riddling in moist underwear.

I know what you are. And are not. Clever devils market their hells accordingly. I saw her. Red riding hood. Talking with the wolf. Explaining what he'd done with grandma. I still have her picnic basket. All the little morsels no one could eat.

I was there. When the bears found Goldilocks sleeping in their bed. Made her their crunchy lollipop.

I am. I was. Every channel. Every broadcast. The world climbing that rope in gym class. Everyone watching. Then it was over.

And even shame was a luxury.

Shifting time lines we revisit each other's skin. Creating more of ourselves than we can punish. Traversing dimensions we run into ourselves now and then. Pretending not to recognize those ugly strangers inside our faces. It's just how far. It's just how sharp. The angle is. Between the different and the same.

If I could go back to before I was born. How could I be there at all? I am. Was. Are. Cocktails of us. Shaken. Poured. Smoothing the edges on the mirrors we had to break.

Touch is the perfect portal. Take these dominoes back. Knock them down then. Life is such a cascade. That we can't see coming. One stumble leading to the next. A series of impotent Godzilla's. Gaining momentum.

Telling time in bits of breath. Simple creatures want to understand what they cannot.
Quantifying hours in lipstick and condoms. Naming the machine. Sex. And children. And drugs. Attempting to control it.

Still it takes us away from each other. At every opportunity.

Words. Broken egg shells on the back of her tongue. Making their cuts. There. In jests of the taste. Pain tempers the touch. Like we are there. In the cellar. Listening earnest to the vociferous speeches time would give. Swollen limbs searching for torsos. Fingers. Or toes. Any and all pieces. That could begin to make us whole again.

The downstairs. The dungeons of hours. That proved what had found us. Kept tight. In padlocks we called skin. Calm. Like all dying things are. Eager as a countdowns must be. The trial. In repetitious arguments. Angry judges bang the ceilings. There is a way back. It just doesn't remember us.

The bones prepared for dressing and wigs. Confident. Minus the eyes. Plus the tits. Sour girls flaunt their pussies. Meat in drowning pools. Islands fetching oceans. In weak dribbles of piss.

We have to go back. We can't. So we lie. Tell ourselves we already have.

Planting flowers in the dark. The qualms of symmetry. Disrupting my dialogue with the dead. Sealing up those boxes. And setting the alarm. For now.

Trying hard not to be found. Fetching each island on a whim.

No one there.

Bad things. Worn ugly for the audience. Nothing. Is. Tumbling down. High as we were. Statues without their clothes on. Mad. Like the wish from a little girl's lips. As the world ends around her.

Patience in a long refrain. Like the skin is. So ambivalent. Willing to taste. Try to survive on. Whatever is near enough. Gods in their bedpans. Piss and cum. Turning the leaves colors. In the faces of winter. Too cold. To ask. For a way out.

Trying the limbs on. From seldom dolls. Their dead eyes spoiling her face. With solvent stares. No one looks. She asks him how. He says because. People are empty. Because we want. So many things we'll never have.

You are too close. To god. For any man to love you. But it's obvious you don't care.

I had the map in my palm. That eager time machine. Laughing out loud. As I fiddled with dials. As if. I knew where I was going.

The atom. Arms crossed. Waiting for fusion. Biting her fingernails down to the color of the choice. If there ever was a choice. As choices choose us. In bruises that never appear. To see. Between if and when. Games. Poker in the mythology of how. We could ever know each other. Wagers. Bits of skin to pay for what was always lost.

She leaned over. On the elbow she always kept in hell. She winked at the god she thought she saw. When the music was loud enough to hear the nothing.

He squinted. Nervous fingers explored the margin of her error. Little bites were all she ever took. Living came in cravings, not meals, she told him.

Long breaths. Spread out for the devils. All men must worship. If it is a woman that they are to love. Quiet lies. No one's ever heard. Found their way inside her. Turned the child old.

Jesus she said was just a carpenter. Just a man. With a big hammer. He couldn't even save himself.

The cold growing bolder. Time leaning over to snatch us up. Games. Hopscotch. I am the stone. Lost in numbered boxes. Found alone.

An elbow in hell. A knee in heaven.

Still no closer.

Women. In fractured chambers. Torn dresses wear them each. In broken zippers. Her eyes never close. The rabbit carrying around his foot. For luck.

The universe sneezes. Big boogers of men. To make her ill. To test. How quickly she can recover. Gather all those molecules she dropped. Construct a new window from them. Time is a monster in my closet. No one believes me when I say it's there.

This skin trundles onward. Without me inside it. It's the same no matter what. Addicts pushing their boulders. Up the mountain over and over again. Buckles biting down on the moment. As people come unclothed.

This flesh draws its maps in colors too dark too see. Assembling the atoms like paint by numbers. It goes there. Limping away from where I am. It goes. Like any butterfly would. On paper thin wings. Aloft on a random sneeze.

Their dolls with their unbendable arms. I don't know what to do with them. Too many stairways that end before the top. Too much science. Not enough reason.

Crawling inside the box. Turning on the engine. She waited. For time to say something.

She counted so many years. She counted none.

She asked the world to wait while she finished talking with her tumor. Little chokes of people soil her underwear. She lives as if the world can count. She loves as if touch is literate.

The girl on that dirty sofa with her fingers in her mouth.

I moved the doorway he confessed. I can do little miracles easily. I can do big ones too. If I'm angry enough.

Take off your eyes and look at me. Skin like chewing gum. Hard and flavorless. Tell the woodsman to bring his dullest axe. The wolf in grandma's spectacles is fooling no one.

I move closer. Little lights in the folds of the discarded wrapper. Pink granules of sugar still alive with a cadence lost to math. Stepping on the sounds. In weighted boots. Running. Eyes shut tight. To lock the windows.

Before the world notices we're not there.

Egg yolks on her fingers. All the dresses she'll never wear. A single place.

An empty cellophane. Still stuck in the shape of how sweet it once was.

Come home she dared him. Her pastry lips gathering the icing from his pants.

Look! He shouted. From his centrifugal cloud. It's all a wish no one can grant us. A bad song stuck in our heads. And the only words we can remember are us.

Play. The kitten said. Claws stuck to the carpet. Deal. The lobster insisted. Fumbling with the deck. The bets came rapidly. The pots swelled and vanished. Until everyone was too drunk to care.

She lost her sight on a pair of aces. And won it back on a bluff. Little tourniquets in the corners of the room. Color in her wrists. The hours come in fervent itches. The years in a pussy rash.

Leave. Turn the engine over on those tears. Move.

Talk to the teeth. Bald cadavers digging through our gums. Mercy is in the fangs. Sharp. Precise. Love is in the molars. Chewing. Grinding. Eager to swallow.

I'm not her. Hard pockets of chewing gum under his clothes. To make us wonder. Why the hunger still is. The rook on the edge of its square. Too linear to capture his king alone.

He waits for the bishop.

Impotent.

He assumes the game has rules.

We had baked potatoes. Crisp on the outside with delicate innards. Like old men in their scratchy sweaters insisting its warm enough. Like little girls with their dolls dangling from their wrists. Making a trail in the mud as they run. Toward.

And away.

From everything that they love.

Half dead. Half naked. All the way scarred. Stronger for it. Coaxing the shadows to persist as the light behind her steadily dissipates.

We had beef. The tough kind no amount of wine can cure. Smelling soft and juicy as the room filled with dead things. Giving my salivary glands a hard on as I waited for the sauce to thicken. Like people. And their arbitrary conversations. About themselves. How everyone else fits into the plan that is them. Crippled gods looking for steps back up to Olympus. Like little boys. Their sneakers all caked in mud. Coming home to white carpets. Big houses where the small things have no constant.

Perception is a devastating flaw.

They go searching for roads they can barely remember. Half asleep. Lies they never believed. But now must. They search the walls for clues to escape their prison. Headlights through the window. Ravens on the ledge. They linger in the doorway.

Wearing out the last of their crayons. Coloring in all those windows.

Their dead dolls. A tedious pendulum. Time has forgotten.