The bark on the back of his shins never really got hard. Pressing on the buttons. Pulling on the levers. Change has abandoned us.

He would cry. The dry tears of a desperate salesman. Only scars left to peddle. He would limp. On feet made of cardboard. Insisting it wasn't raining.

The thimble never quite fit. The needle always had a hard time hanging onto its thread. He didn't need blankets. Nor clothes. The cold places are idle. We are always moving.

The dog chewing its tail. Caught at last. After years of running in circles. It's such a terrible disappointment. To get what you want.

I was myself so long. Then suddenly I was her. And we were strangers. Franctically rubbing empty lamps. Scouring the past for a wish misplaced.

Determined to prove. Discover any indication. Of choice.

The wizard. The curtain. A squeaky tin man. Still searching for the heart he never knew he had.

The wizard. The curtain. The ruby slippers. That lie to her. Convince her that the witch is defeated.

The horse in its harness. Struggles against the soil. Heavy hooves churn the Earth. It runs on broken wind. It sprints during our weakest hours. Lofty belfry. Chiming harsh. With dead astronauts. Sent to extract missing gods.

I don't sleep. I just keep tying the knots. As he bends down. Looking for the words to say. How close. How far. The drastic. The drama. In tuxedos. As if heaven sends out invitations.

The wolf. Bastards prepare the moment. Soft blankets for hard amends. I worked out the reason. I determined the expanse. I found the island. Was found by it. And time didn't matter at all. We were alone in our speculation. We were hard in our wars. Small soldiers. With big guns. Shooting at distant targets.

She tried to tell us how beautiful it was. But the ugly was all we could imagine. As the colors broke. As skin remembered the little choices it had been forced to make.

Soft aces against spades. Deal me a suicide. In random bets. Short clubs with heavy handles. Kings on the thumb. Pressing the gasket. Hard liars mix the hand.

Turn off the faucet. Chase the leaky drum. The trenchant rhythm. Gross with resolve. Ants to the nest. Certain. In their poisons. The walls still stand. Grave predators in the shadow of my submission. I never wake up. Just fall farther still.

He was just a man. Fables and semen to color the outline. So many women. Heavy levers. Flat cunts at the fulcrum. Paled by the physics.

I want. The transparency. That flesh insists. Time pinwheels. As we clutch. The handles that make it spin. I want. The moments that skin pretends. I swallow the cum of impotent demons. And try to imagine the breadth of their wings.

She carries the ink. In small betrayals. Bargains negotiate the man. She draws. Still. With her broken pencils. Corrupt with the skeleton. Consumed with the colors. She's been convinced are there.

Empty atoms on the highways. Their looming axles in the mountains. I woke up. Soft petals on the verge of mania. Tall beers and probability. Turn the liars into battles long since lost.

The war is quiet. The army is come. To determine what we've lost.

Back doors. Letting out the tits. In rash celebrations. Letting in the cunts. On humble occlusions. She's just a girl. With more words than voices. She's just a child with one more dick. She just an old woman with one less reason.

The engine warned. This isn't even close. The dark. Choking equations. Shit out the algorithms. That seldom find. She was just wandering through the forest. With only the trees as her guide. Lying. Telling the sky she was ready to fly.

Her nylons ran. He chased them. Up and down her shivering thighs. The gas station yawned. They slept together in the faint tent of poison. As if there was somewhere still to go.

She was cold. Firm in her disease. Patterns she explained. The rake of skin across your orgasm. Otherwise it's just masturbation. It's only sex if it hurts a little. It's only sex when we're young. It's only love when we're hopeless.

Everything else is just broken people. Stumbling as they do. Gas can in our throats. Looking for those matches.

Boasting a jar full of fingers. She neglected the lid. Preservation is faulted by the thoughtless math of useless limbs.

There is no hosiery in heaven. Just open legs. That don't know what rape is. There are no condoms in hell. Just this one cancer we all share. She had the egg shells in her hand. Frail worlds broken into the bowl. She had the pan on the stove top. And the flame set to high.

Tiny medicines treat gigantic diseases. People fiddling with their groins. Faulty time machines. That constantly send us back to each other. Though it's the last place we belong.

When is it? Always. Where is it? Here. How? Because we are molting these skins again. And these new ones always fit too tight.

Stretch it out. Take it off. Do whatever it is you do that makeS the world spin faster and the clock tick so loud.

Measure the volume with numbers. Prove it with anything else.

White dogs on the sniff. Collars taut. Leashes short. Everyday we would wake up in the soil and search for the seeds with dirty shovels. And too little rain to make anything grow.

We'd envy the big flowers. And the tall grass. Pondering how well it had negotiated with gravity.

We toted around our heavy watering cans. That would bang against our hips as we walked. We'd bend down and stare the ground. And it was almost impossible to stand back up.

White tire marks on the black pavement. Absent-minded brakes. Every window was open. All ghosts were distracted. The pageant was almost over. And she knew she hadn't won.

But she was tired of wearing borrowed gowns. She was bored with the plebeian algebra of touch. Goading the fractions. Moving the decimal. Closer to the skin. Further from the purpose.

But it's only a dream. And I can wake up. Whenever I want to.

It would all be gone. Except for the nails in my arms. And the hammers in their fists.

The color of the flame changes. Depending on what you're burning. Pretty girls in their vague callouses. Try to remember how it was to feel. When the colors would turn. Macroscopic prisms withering through the fray of melting skins. The anxious fire. Finds a name for every stray.

Effortless time lines. Manifest in broken letters. Empty pens.

Embrace the nightmare. The black flame under your dress. Go where you want. Reciting the bitter palindromes time scrapes across our hearts. Same devils. Forwards or back.

Say their names. As if you know them. Spoil in the floods they would expel. A blunt of mosquitoes hording on the skin. A brief summer. In a dungeon of winters.

Try on their weakness. Quickly. Insects in the walls. Biting quietly. Only the scars tell us they were there.

The flame flickers again. And I know. Something else is gone.

Her eyes on the stairwell. As it rumbled down into the earth. Below where she'd always lived. Torn stockings. Cheating up cold legs. For places unseen. Her fingers on the rail. Like a snake. Slithering through tall stalks of when. Ready to poison if.

She didn't wake him up. In the bleak of the afterward. A contingency. His moist penis. Reinforces the walls inside her. No windows. No doors. Neither entry nor exit. For poorly drawn cunts. And the dried up markers that made them.

His fading breath. Thick pillows under her head. Peddling pliant nightmares through the dents in her forehead. I always wake up just before they drive the first nail. I always wake up with the pillows on the floor. And a monster under the bed.

I go to the cellar. Because down makes sense. But they're not there. I go to the attic. Because up is a curious logic. I wish to comprehend.

No windows. No doors. No entry nor exit. Only through the small holes in this heavy skin.

It was lesson enough. Dresses stuck to thighs. Blank chalkboard. Spreading the calf. In bits of bone too fragile to blame. For the dead. That make the world so small. That I can stand on top of it. Tell my stories like some lost god waiting for his demons to rise.

Accuse. Pale skin and broken bones. Of certain treason.

Wipe my pussy clean she proclaimed. As the field passed over her crotch. I can go there. In bursts of flesh. Burnt candles. Name the brave children. Drowned in this painted ocean.

Give us names the future might understand. Dress in fractions the hours would pretend. Are near enough. To choose. Why we can still hear what no one says.

Put on your gloves. Scape the ice from the windshield. Obey the stop sign on her forehead. Observe the intersection in our grasp.

I was no one. And I still am. But she was loud. She screamed above them. Breaking the ladder in half. Forcing them to crawl up the mountain. Convincing them to ask. Where the light was coming from.

Tits. Coy cockroaches. Hiding in the corners of his eyes. Pussy. Junkie gods spreading their toes for the needle.

She talks about the moon. In slow stutters. Her words. Churning. Broken pulleys. Racked with gravity. She talks about her friends. Bits of ink trapped under her skin. Colorful drugs. That don't get her high anymore. She sobs about her grandmother. Evil, old woman with bloated fingers and sharp fingernails. Empty graves still waiting on a name. Bad dolls.

Their rubber thumbs on the ignition. As the engine chokes to life. Despite our determination to resist. Just time. Weak vaccinations. A little bit of the sickness. To make us immune.

This flesh. A virulent virus. Mutating with every treatment. Bad dolls. In their Velcro clothes. Their dresses coming apart again. Dicks like little soldiers. Firing on anything that moves.

Inside her time machine she waits for the world to end. She waits so long. Not realizing that it has.

She tries to count the wolves, but she always loses track about half way through.

The door was open as I drew on it. In dried up marker. Small eyes in big glasses. Pretending to see. The wrinkles in their paper demons. Missing suns as the clouds fall from the sky. Lonely men with their faulty compasses. Still searching for the forest.

The window was cracked. As I poured the water over the cactus. They grow so slow. Just like us. Beating those clay pots with threats of life that never come to fruition. Just sharp spines. That charm me to touch them. Thrill this skin with bouts of blood that don't know how to count.

Years come and gone. Return in urgent pleats. Dead things wager the margins. Tall against this grey slab. Dense with saving. So much nothing.

She had always worshipped nothing. And been worshipped in return by it. She had always believed in the nothing. And had thought it obvious. That nothing was all the only constant.

Trimming her claws on smaller men she pondered the red. Heavy from the weight of too many saviors. She asked, has the sky gone dark or am I just blind again? I can see someone there, but I don't know who they are.

Oh, the short dress on her long legs. Permanent marker. Plastic stitches for paper wounds. The short dress. Well, it makes her strong. When weak is what she is. Bad dogs show their teeth. As she enters the closet. Bad dogs growl. As she takes those bones off their hangers.

Sometimes it's yourself that you stumble upon. After too many hours of drinking back the years. You unfold the rabbit and test out its ears. The things you'll hear. Make you wonder. Do words exist. Did anyone ever speak to me. Or have I always been deaf. Just putting faces on the silence. Paint the tiger. Steal its stripes. Crawl inside the furnace and pretend there is no winter.

Talk to yourself. Stranger to stranger. Explain. How it all culminates in this discussion. Turn off the stove and take a peak inside it. Dead things with the skin falling off for dinner. Dry heat and bones draw their pictures on your grave.

Keep calculating. Keep talking to yourself. Clench those grenades. Toast the explosions. Naming the raindrops. One. Two. Three. Twelve. Gathering at the window. With a bucket full of selves.

No equations. Just random sticks. Beating the mud. Ugly caterpillars. On the end of the branch.

Holes in every leaf. And still famished.

Talking to myself. Or someone who looks like her. Trying to explain. How many times we've already had this conversation.

The numbers pretended to know us. Where we were going. Feeble leaps into the future. That left us stranded. With those same dicks in our fists. Those same holes quivering after the tip of the condom was engorged.

Wavering torches flirting grandly with thick curtains. Lies are long division. I can determine the answer. But truth. Truth is calculus. I'm looking. Always looking for where I can. Stop counting.

The numbers. Quiet births. And calm abortions. Begin and end with this flesh. These arbitrary time machines we call sex. The chamber. Dense with urgent atoms. Divide us. And divide us again.

Fission. Body. Grave. Devotion. Tease the explosion. Barter with the barrier. Between myself and her. Just now. And then. Escalating their argument. On where. Or how. Or when we were.

Engines curdle for tomorrow. The names we take. And are given. Fictions of only a moment. Fast become. Truths too permanent.

I explain to him that we have no past. No future. Only windows. That keep us apart from each other. But he doesn't believe me when I tell him the glass can be broken.

The awkward. The torn thumbs of the teddy bear. Grasping. Ribbons of when. The cold transmission. The clutch clean. As we threaded the engine. With gravel and rest stops too close to fiction.

The concert in her underwear. Applauding him. Vectors. Submarines coming to surface. The torpedoes in her pants. Little women. Big girls. Time on their tits. In morbid revelations of the skin.

Finding the zipper. With her broken thumb. Pulling it open with her missing fingers. The fist pretends to know her. Memories she has of holding. Things she never did.

The rain. Perpetuating an ocean not deep enough. To drown. All these dead things I say I am.

Teasing the clutch. Well below her toes. The gas. Smothering the engine. In so many places she's yet to go.

men on her doorstep. selling installments of heaven. in small doses of hell.

She swallows their medicine. But is more content to see the disease prevail.

Time is weak. Time is deaf. But flesh hears. Everything.

The truck never stopped. Neither did I. Collision is a necessary experience for bone and tissue to mature. It must be broken. To trust that it can mend. It must be torn to know that it can stretch. Only so far.

The hours were small. With bitter men. On their way to times they never could imagine would greet them. Punctured tires still spinning strong on axles long since separated from their chassis. Numbers caught in algebraic storms not soon to be solved.

I said go with me. We can find it there. In vagrant flesh that doesn't care what gods we beg. I admitted that I was going nowhere. And posited that he followed the same map.

I said take my clothes off. Challenge me to be this skin. This paradise of cells that threatens to drown my thoughts. Needs your serpent. Are only a weight upon my bones without this temptation.

These rough pastels. Of scratch and semen. Are the only art this fragile canvas can hold.

There is no sun anymore. The grey prevails. Drunken Romeo. With his fingers in his lover's tragic cunt. The sun doesn't shine at all. In this dinghy corner of the world. As I scratch my pictures into the falling dominoes.

Chalk dust in my teeth. And chewed dolls. Flaunt their gory feet. For the switch. On this devilish machine. That lives inside us all. Numbers carefully arranged. Debts too sore to sleep.

Going back. In blatant trembles. Skin vanished from heavy thumbs. On looming blackouts. Power is often given. Seldom taken. The choice. The monster. Louder with every decision.

The future comes though she begs it not. The past expects her redolent song. Been there. Done that. Semen on the headboard. Muted scars in the wood. Telling their stories to the glass.

The quantum. The mechanics. Of flattened skin. Failing checkerboards for dying kings. And the queen. The game never notices her until she's gone.

Fluctuations. That's what he said. As he loosened his tie. Records skipping. On the deep trenches in our skin. All our gods. Not understanding. How close we are. To reaching them.

It's just a button on her cunt that I occasionally press. Like everything we do, It wants to mean more than it does.

Every time we wake up together I check my wrists for blood.

At the early morning I wake the owl. To find out what it saw. That I could not. In the darkness. Together we explore. The dense intersections that make humanity something to watch. Long stories short of breath.

Flat tires rolls over her skin. Feeble jacks repair nothing. In blank hours. Too weak to search for names.

She prods the doll with missing feet. For answers too old to catch. Her fraying net. fumbles with the pieces too small to keep. She pokes the dead things with her stick.

As it crumbles inside her fist.

Just doors. At the back of her head. That keep coming open.

The voice came in tiny stitches. You are here. You always have been. Bisect. Tempt the triangle with your elastic logic. Time scribbling on your wrists. So many stories already told. Vomit on my new dress. Elaborates on the science. Of forgetting.

It was just a pickup truck. Stalled on the side of the road. And I was only its passenger. As the driver choked.

The circle comes in vague differentials. The radical is multiplied. I don't need the brake. This kind of math is easier done fast. Without looking. At what you're trying to add. Or have to subtract.

The dictator moves through her skin. Just below her clothes. A benevolent cancer. Filling in all the holes.

There have always been scripts. Vague grunts from the gears. Stutters of math. As the turbines coax hesitant skin. Through empty portals.

The hot pink in her shoulders was nothing at all like the red in her crotch. It came so sudden. In condoms flushed. and false apocalypses. This future. This past. That are each the same. Or so alike other this knob that I'm always fiddling with. This red, red button I've still yet to push.

I could say it was simple subtraction, but what of these leftover skeletons. So I toy with the notion that it can be captured. Or at least harnessed. Breaking the smallest pieces. To influence the giants. Building walls to confine them. Arranging numbers to harvest the sum.

Solving the equations in stupor of when genius mattered. And time was travel. Little pigs. Pull on the the levers. As the wolf catches his breath.

Even if these weak machines could ever hope to keep up. The numbers arrive in blind reciprocals. Wolf's teeth and tails. And heavy picnic baskets.

That can't feed the predators in grandma's clothes.

Can I measure the blood in its teeth. Against that on its claws. In quarts of if. How can I ever make the wolf stop wanting. When I've only these same three dead pigs which to feed it. Only this one fraying, red hood with which to cover my head.

Sidewalks in the swimming pool. Deceive the short of breath. She took a sip of her denial and went on walking through the water.

Lawn chairs. Spines for crippled robin hoods. Clumsily stealing the shit from rich toilets. Sober. A traffic jam in her throat. A thousand voices. None of which she can discern.

Daylight. The cough. In dull splinters through her lungs. Nights. Spent extracting them.

It's Mars he said. You can still see the sun from here. It's flat tires and chewing gum. On the side of the road. As if your ass is a pinwheel and your cunt is made of roses. And you still don't get picked.

You throw the stone, but can't find the square. Or any angle that makes sense. The clothes are always trying you on. The needles are constantly sewing on your eyes. but still you search for the zippers that aren't there.

Seeing the future in her pupils. Strict waterfalls. Chasing the barrels over the edge. The ocean. Humming in his chest. Time dilations. Fiddling with the loose algebra of skin. Toying with solving for x.

Blind hotels. Full of unknowing prostitutes. I'd open a window if that were possible. I'd sleep through the fire alarm given the chance. So the building could be empty as I begin to remember if I ever knew. Those broad strokes in their paper dresses. The thump of the canvas as it speculates on the colors we'll take home with us.

I wrote my only novely down my arm. In a cheap hotel not far from my house. A little razor. A little dick. Art enough for any museum.

I stayed behind as the world went on. Time dilation. Science whoring to the flesh. In vague streetlamps. And quick shots of bourbon. That almost make sense together.

A pity it is. These songs in my head. No one can hear. Nervous pendulums at the mercy of fetid clocks. Teddy bears with all their buttons undone. Pasting dying flowers onto crumbling walls.

I woke up so many times. But the dream would always resume. Underground. Trying to remember the sky. the scrape of dandelions as I would try to breathe.

It's much too long a journey from here to there. The apple on its tree ripe with temptation. We can't go yet, I tried to warn him. It was much too soon. To pilot all those oceans away from the moon.

I'm just the child in her sleep. Turning over with her angry dreams. I'm just that pen running out of ink. Kittens' claws on their mother's teats. Piercing the milk from her belly.

We went to bed. Trying to pretend we'd never been. We closed our eyea. Speculating. Small hammers negotiating fingers. She put her lips on the same as she always had. But this time, they didn't fit.

So she kissed him goodbye. As if they had never met.

The orchard rich in tunnelling despair. The ballerina. Her leotard torn. Her toes breaking. As she turns to look at the audience she never knew was there.

Dismal claps illuminate her traverse. As she hobbles over the hardwood. To a dressing room without a lock on the door.

Spreading the moons across skin. Navigating her cunt like churning butter. Digging for the solids. In so much useless liquid.

She tugged her shoes back on. Though she'd only just wedged them off. Blame the snow. Blame the weather. For convincing her to ignore it. The tiles filthy with where she'd taken them off. Sketches of her journey to go nowhere. She turned to look at him and said, it's star trek. A future we've always imagined, but will never see. All this skin. Every bit of it. Is cinema. Poorly written scripts that never give us names.

No heroes to worship. No villains to blame. Just the diseases that make us human. Fouling these blank pages.

The awkward emperor. Paints his kingdom in the hues. Of blind deities. And deaf demons. All the sounds and colors much better reserved for people rather than gods. He struts boastfully in his invisible clothes. A child. A clown. An empty kingdom. Where the soil still salivates for a viable seed.

Water. Water everywhere. Won't you grow this root. That plays the dagger to my weak Iago. Betrayed. Sent home with nothing but my impotent Othello. These stern Desdemona's failing like bad multiplication tables.

But I am not trying on his clothes. That arrogant emperor. With his shit buried in the roses.

We go back. We go forward. We travel all manner of instances. As if we have power, but we have failed to convince it.

We paint the railings. For our hands to grip. As we stumble down the stairs. In a panic. It's not like I knew. It's not as though I cared.

I just found him there. In a torn cocoon. Without wings and demanding that I remember. What never happened. Between us.

Dartboards at the back of her throat. Search for bulls eyes below. Frame the moment. As you would any piece of art. That is all we are.

Finger tumble. Into open fists. Circuits resolve. The fraying wires that impede the electricity.

See... I was discussing with the velveteen rabbit what happens after the disease is gone. Where those dirty skins end up. Once the child is taken away from us.

Real. Is such a stubborn paradox. Real. In the blurry vision of myopic gods. There is your religion. There is your salvation. That I wake up every day the same as I went to bed. Unchanged. Unmolested. By the feeble ghosts that haunt them.

Oh. Of course. I'd be willing to try on the teddy bear. But why? Why would you ever ask me to? When we both know it won't fit.

Darwin with his mask on. Superheroes in our faces. Making us small.

Reset the lag bolt he said. Too matter of fact. Where's my wrench I asked. You'll find it. Just keep looking. It's all there. Waiting for you.

The formula. Grossly misinterpreted. Skin like riverbeds. The future with its plastic eyelashes. Laughing as we make our way there.

The mountain. Ready to crumble. The boots on his feet determined to stand. Familiar reruns. Translate the numbers. Errant atoms make the rest of us timid.

Small crucifixes. Display the men. Heroes. Villains. Thieves. The dead will remember us as they see fit.

The loop breaks. And we are throttled into different versions of ourselves. Touching the mirror. With shaky fingers. Watching the sky fall. In fragments of how.

It could ever be this cold.

The map waits in the sinew. The road in the excrement. Long hikes through the woods. Where deaf men hear the most. And timid tigers learn how to hunt. Dots in the skin draw vague pictures. With absent fingers.

I told the genie I had no wishes to make. Just a day or two choose from. In which it's safe to die. I asked him if he could tell me when. But he said it was still undetermined.

Rank molecules distract the atom from its path. Diligent math is a faulty barometer at best. We are here. But where is this. We are cannibals, but who shall we eat next.

The secret that the science will never tell you. The physics that we cannot correlate. Is desire. Is skin. Is matter.

This much. No more.

The universe with its clown face on. Tumbling out of its tiny car. Everyone claps and then it's gone.

What never came out? What didn't fit inside?

I slept until noon and still hadn't slept enough. I wedged myself deep into the pillows and pondered how large the room had become. Little epiphanies in clothes that don't fit. Bits of her undressing. For long naps. Big chunks still searching. For all the skin the window took.

Distorted checkerboards. Pace their vagrant chips. Like toes on his penis. Little pigs with their snouts to the engine. Squealing.

I slept wherever the sun wasn't. Because it never comes here anymore. I dreamed of tilting doorways. And the hammers I used to prop them up. The collapse made sense. That I should hold up the roof. While the walls came in.

She is not the same. Counting. Metrics and reason. Offer her their seat. As the rain pelts the windows. As the leaves promise not to fall.

The dead speak. In temperamental riddles. The cadavers laugh. Again. When I can't remember their names.

Everything is so close. But I am so far from everything.