Small towers in the neck of the sun. Breathe slowly. The fallen raindrops. Clothes off. She takes the funeral quietly. A muted sneeze. The disease all over her. She pulls a tissue from the bunch. So certain in the repetition.

Writing the math in yellow chalk. On a dinghy blackboard. Deleting it with coughing erasers. Pythagoras wakes up from his grave. To tell her. It isn't squared.

Finding the island. As lost as it has been. Makes me wonder. At the arrogance of the equation. A thousand times then. A thousand times more. I add them up. And still have nothing.

The rabbit with the icicle in her hand. Swallows the cold. Wears the weather. In her skin. Content. In her quest. To wait. For the sun to shine again.

The alien was trying on his cape. Slightly ostentatious. The knight adjusted his codpiece. Butterflies on the lens. As the camera blinked a piece of dirt away from its eye. Skin like nations. Leaders fail it again and again. But war. War makes the us certain. Especially when the war is over.

Little green men. With their wrinkled trousers. Examining the teeth on zippers left open. Adamant mammals with their fingers on the trigger. Arrogant apes designing their god in their own image.

The portals dare come open given enough encouragement. Limbs and breasts rake the furthest margins. Butterflies about to sneeze. Abruptly change the world. Time is a suspect in this crime. But still innocent until guilt is proven.

Bland hallways embark us on our stilted journey. I take the pill. This oblique medicine. Full of sickness. Is all there is to save us.

Tall men. Arbiting the sun. As shadows imprint. Bent down over empty baskets. Leaving the woodsman to his ax. And the witch to her oven.

Candy houses not withstanding.

The elf was wearing brown shoes. A dense feather in his cap. As if toys are made. Not found. As they always are. The winter squandered. The snowmen dissolved. She told herself the puddle was sufficient reminder. Of all that was gone. She was lying. As she was given to do. When kites were to be flown. In meager winds.

The earth was negoiating its revolutions around the sun. With its usual arrogance. She bribed it with a glance. At the sun. She put it to bed. With bland stories of resolve. To save ourselves.

She knows the earth is so much water for a reason. Cause none of us can really swim. We've been drowning so long. It feels like floating. She knows. Words are the last refuge of the insignificant. I can't remember and I don't expect. Anyone would want to.

Shall I open the portal. Tempt the tears in the continuum. Change the timeline. Erase us.

Shall I shove the doll into its plastic shoes. Try on each alien. As if we'll remember having met. Go back. Turn that heavy wheel. On islands that won't let us leave. Live as if the only world is this. Die knowing it isn't true.

When I go there I come back different. I don't know what is missing. But whatever it is. I want it.

I made my way through the meat. Myself getting cooked more than it.

We were pretending a picnic. With broken forks. And missing paper plates. No games at all. Except those we'd already lost.

I was remembering the curtains. This window once wore. Like faded jeans. Too tight to take off. Nervous fingers. Struggling with shy zippers. As we tempted those masks.

The weight of the glass as we would wrench them open. The rumble. Of open. Too loud to resist. The rush of breathing in the world out there. The little lies that made it possible for these memories to exist.

Dirty glasses on the eyes. Of myopic gods. That would tell us. This is our timeline. I could tell them that it's not that easy. To close the window. Once it's open. I could tell them that the lock is broken. But I doubt that they would listen.

I could reason with the wolf. Explain to him that the pig is deaf. But he wouldn't care. If it can't feel the predator coming. So be it.

I could complain that the glass is obvious. So cliched. But I don't lie that well. And this dress doesn't hide very much.

I wondered at the backdoor. How many steps there were. I thought. I can overcome the darkness. With sufficient warning. But the window has other plans. The proximiity of bariable gods. Created an impossible paradigm.

That stubborn window. Still open. Listening for. The raindrops. That used to make it laugh.

The hidden variable manifests. In pale dresses. Heavy breasts. Betraying the constant. Causality commits the sin. Entanglement explains it. On a quantum level.

We are all that small. Hopped up on photons. Looking for the portal. As the paradox closes in. Rubbing dirty lamps. Toiling with atoms. Obstinate in their paths.

One big wish. Or three little ones. The genie offered. As I wrestled with the mechanics. Of broken particles. And things too small to see. Shaping our world.

I wish. I wish to know. Everything. And no one. Is there a constant? Or just interminable entanglement? Connection distorted. I vary. We are constant. Explain this discrepancy.

She is the color red. He is green. The universe shuffles them. Which one did you get?

Small. Is what we are. When the math roars. Too confident. Patterns of touch prone the theory. Correlations. Disburse. In random feats. Parables of if. Distance is irrelevant. We are tangled up. Pauses in the same song. We fast forward. Isolating the atoms. That would make us small.

We write to the vultures. The dead ask for graves. And so we dig. The variable is how deep. The constant is for what.

The torn edge of her eyelash. Stuck to my fingertip. The frayed stitch in her ambivalence. Caught the silence speaking. Too loudly. The words on her lips are treason. The shock of her skin is loyalty. Soft daggers skim the grave. Shifting the equation from how to when. Any lies could ever be as potent as this one is.

The angle closes on choice. Focusing negatives seek the prime. The calculation is brief. The answer finite. Except how. And why. Tales are told. Lives are absolved. To thoughtless indiscretions. Calm enough in their calamities. To forget. Anything that can't take us there.

The Frankenstein in his lab. Fumbles with the lightning. The monster in his bed. Barely awake. He works the corpse. The flatulently dead veins. For traces of disease. For tumbled drinks. And arrogant cocktails. That play with the scale. Measuring so many nothings. Trying so desperately to convince dead skin that it can feel.

It's her arithmetic that stalls on. Monsters under the bed. Counting backward from zero.

This derelict sky. That refuses to fall. On little chickens. Bad atoms. Vomitting. Too small to notice. Changing everything. It is falling. It is. Fast. But no one can see.

The monster. Shivering under her bed. Afraid. To face her. Telling its children. Scary stories about the world above. Frightening people. That build their closets with the bones of murdered monster babies.

Just places. Dim with transition. And molted skins. The frightened ghouls. Quivering under our beds. So afraid of the people above.

Their big teeth. Their sharp claws. All uselesss against. Determined hours dissolve. Into lessons. On apathy. Denial. Linear directives in the chemical life. Mutated survival mechanisms. Create the bashful monsters. That they would kill us quietly.

She weighs what she's gathered. During her travels. She weighs it against the things not taken. All this skin. All these bones. Just to try being anyone. A monster. A man. So much waste. All it takes is an atom. One little atom.

To change everything.

Mannequin faces. Prematurely abort the kiss. Skin candy wrappers come open. Crinkle. Chew. Spit. Empty. Hungry again.

Pliers in her legs. Tear the nails from the coffin in her belly. Hammers in her fingers drive them back in.

Dead is dead.

Composite moments. Multiply when. Exponents. Converge. Quantum beasts extract the molecules from if. Add the ghosts. Subtract the flesh. Divide by then.

The candy house is easy to eat. Hard to digest. She sits on her sweet pot of shit. Drawing in the piss. Pathways. To how. The sugar turned hard. And stole our teeth.

Whispering to the pigs. Warning them. They don't listen.

Scratching at the switch. Numbers falling down. One push. They all fall. Teasing the edge. In fits of spandex and panties. Only a desperate man can understand. The monster in her ball gown. Stepping out of the portal. No world can keep her in. Or out.

I can't go there. Only glimpse. As she tears the nails from time's fingertips. Cuts off its toes with heavy wrenches.

I only know. She's wasting her pain.

No matter what she does to it.

It will never tell.

I was contending with how. Dirty glasses on my eyes. Spoiling the world. That old movie screen heavy across my brow. It felt like the music would never stop. We'd be charmed forever. By these prosaic victims. Doomed to that cliched twist. Where the villain is vanquished. And the hero is forgotten.

Still knives on the edge of the paper. As we grope for the story. The stout darkness. Shrinks my fingers. Makes the words too heavy.

In the bedroom. Where the mouse is often chased and seldom caught. She tests out her claws. In her empty nightgown. The trap is set. Soft cheese anticipates broken necks. The predator is certain. The sratches are deep. Price tags on flesh. Default to the mortgage of touch.

Heavy boulders to push. As the mountain continues to repeat.

The flight to Olympus. Reveals only absentee gods. The door to heaven. Bursts open. To emptiness.

She's gone.

On the outside. The statisticians in the fold. Take up their irons. Angry ghosts press on the creases. Make certain we will not forget. The setting suns at our backs. The rising dicks at our throats. The fierce genitalia of the calendar. As it births the dead.

Struggling gods. On their heavenly futons. Dream of their simian victims of gravity. studious to the texts. Flesh has laid out for them. Meticulously aware of the hours. Designated to assign life to what cannot live.

She pulled him inside the chamber. Dark and bright. With admonished thoughts. Of how close far is. How brief eternity. When it's nothing we can understand. We are scuffs marks. On the shoes of bigger feet. Snot expelled by hurried winds.

Arranging numbers. Desperate to know. How. If. When. It will ever make sense. Manipulating the math. To convince ourselves we matter.

Exiting the chamber. He saw the fingers of gravity. Reaching out to grab them. He saw the smirk of the wind. As it blew passed.

Scattering any evidence. That he had been there.

It was always raining. And it continued to do so.

Addressing the calm. In reluctant proliferation's. The gods dance down from the sky. Tiny births. Gaping pussies. Sure enough. The marker was permanent. I scribbled something thoughtless. Content that thoughtless was all I owed him.

She was busy. Removing the arms from the dolls. She was watching them try to walk. On their soft legs. Obsessed with molding the moment. To fit the soft earth. That betrayed her progress.

There is now. There is the trial. Skin on skin. Creating an infinite negative. There is then. The appeal of sour fruit. Lonesome bandits raid the heart.

There is the bulb. The small switch. That stretches around the ass the of the sun. The professor in his too round glasses. Calculating us. The Tense. The grammar of when. We were those people. Bound to the comas. Confident. In the words. That had taken us there.

That she could bleed that much. Without anyone noticing.

The flaws in time travel suddenly obvious.

Adverbs and adjectives. The forward and the back. Doing cartwheels on the atom. I would say it's ugly, but that would be cliched. I would say it's absurd, but that would be treason.

You can't just go to a bar. You have to wake up in one after too many strangers. You can't just find god. You have to know that he's not there. That the meaning in the math can only take us so far. And the science. it listens hard, but seldom hears.

Adverbs and adjectives. Meaning and meaninglessness. The man in his skin. Rummaging around for a switch. To turn on. See again. To turn off. Be sightless at last. Now that he knows. There is nothing to see here.

Monkeys at the backdoor of heaven. The devil offering them a way in.

You can't just have sex. You have to be had by it. Absolved to. The last few grains. As that hourglass empties. Adverbs. Adjectives. Strangers at the gates. All sick with your dilemma.

God in missing words. This puzzle. I've assembled. These men. Bits of Pi. Rationalize the circle. These phrases. Adverbs and adjectives. Stutter on the fulcrum. I lean on the lever. And all these puzzles are solved.

It's just bone. On a steep waterfall of flesh. They're just gods with their eyes closed. As we swoon over their cliffs.

She walked for miles with that pebble in her shoe. It was so many years before she realized. it had always been there. Always would. She wore that torn nightgown with so much pride. By the time you get there you're naked.

She used to say. Still does. Choice is. The weakest legacy of flesh. She would speculate. About time. With the same aggressive pessimism. Time is just a pattern. A random confluence of circumstance colliding with immovable bodies. The problem with inertia is that it's too agreeable.

Chronology is only a symptom of eager cells. Busy with absent-minded bouts of reproduction. Evolution made sex this good. It took humans to ruin it.

There are so many places to be. This reality. Or the countless others this universe threatens. Heavy trench coats. defy the climate. As we continue to ignore. The swaying bridge.

The absolute. Fervent malfunctions in touch. Mushroom. Then settle. Deep winters reluctant to breathe. In the simple dances we can identify. As life. Or rather, the art therein. Rabid dogs. Work the backdoor to their advantage.

She gropes for sensation. Liberated cells flaunt the math. Mocking. Of the ill-precision on which sex depends. Correlating. The weakest of those quarks. Arranging them. Astutely in the core of the atom. Orgasm is a mad scientist. The heart is the guinea pig.

The absolute. There is no such thing. Flower petals under their feet as they stomp away from what they almost wanted. Vast gardens in the coma dreams of far away astronauts. Who will wake up to worlds we'll never see.

She negotiates the verbiage. Tall bean stalks wave the giant over her head. A handful of beans. Are nothing. Are everything.

She had time. Or it had her. How to know the difference? Thong or g-string. Your ass is bare either way. Zero times zero she grumbled into her pillow. As one left. Roads close. Airplanes crash. Train tracks never go away. Because we need a path.

She had read every fairy tale. And lived each one. The wolf. The pigs. The princesses. They were true. She knew. But always only in the saddest interpretations.

She'd been on rocket ships that had soared passed the moon. It was lonely. She had been on big ships in the middle of the ocean. It was lonely. She had been all over the world. Countries. Places. People. It was lonely. Zero times zero.

Puddles of skin spilling gracelessly into one another. Try her on. Try her off. Hares on the race course. Forgetting the tortoise. Monkeys pulling the decimal left. Not comprehending percentages. Eager to multiply their zeroes.

The casual dilemmas flesh faces. Easily absolved. With first grade arithmetic. Zero times zero.

She had her bricks. But she gave them all away. Hoping to be eaten.

He fixed the math. Quite easily. Portions of god he explained. Were what the numbers needed.

She drew her bath. The acid quite controlled. She laid out her things. Her panties amongst the colorful. Her cunt. Just like a desert where all the plants heave to grow. Her breasts. A Ferris wheel. content to strand passengers on top of the world.

Adam came. Before he ever met Eve. The last thing we need is a short-sighted god with a penchant for rules. The monkeys danced. Long before anyone had named them. The monkeys made war with sticks and stones. All we did was make war into a bigger profit.

I tried to fix the math, but it was too far broken. I offered it a crutch to replace its missing limbs. You can go back only so far. But you can change nothing.

Long skirts on little girls. Big men with the scissors between their fingers. Cutting open.

Fixed numbers. Flaunting the differences. Not worth mentioning.

Dollar signs and bitten toenails. Scuff the floor with passive resolve. Dirty scribbles. Dig into the city. Places below. Tempt. Walk with me. Into deeper hells. Undo the knot on that dead flower.

Cut the stem in half. Pretty isn't enough. Pluck the petals. Fortunes told in hysterics. Hunting for the roots. With filthy fingers. It grew because I let it. And it is mine to kill.

Portion the flesh. The hunger stretches so far. Vagrant emblems. In a divided world. Feed them. For a while. Then let them starve. Saviors always begin as villains. And always end as myths.

The apples is easily bitten. The taste much harder to forget. I've been here before. I'll be here again. This hopeless repetition is the only thing that makes sense.

Ever since the future refuses to happen the same way twice.

Pigtails on the isotope. Fascinating the measure of mass. Weigh the elements. Against the habit of skin. A lethargic barometer shamelessly predicting. Obvious storms.

The judge on bended knee. Proposing she open her legs. The jury silent. As she confessed. To staring at the ocean. Jealous of how the water molecules managed to stay together. As the moon repeatedly drilled them into a stoic earth. It's the same she protested. It's the same as anything.

Sweaters unravelling around heavy breasts. Cum on her cheek. Birds' wings stroking the clouds. Helpless atoms in a frenzy of how. Soap on the walls as she exits the shower. Filthier because.

Every man is an island. Hopelessly lost. In an ocean of time. Every man is the woman. He almost had. Callous and hardened. By the perennial spectrum . Of flesh to touch. Touch to if.

A chance to be. More than the moment that made us. A threat. That real is dense with this science. Broken dolls flirts with infinite numbers. The man. In rhetorical splices. A film. An exception. The muscle turns on. Graduating to the dark.

I appeal. To the bitter ransom of silence. Give the doll back her eyes. Let her see what it is she's holding.

She stood there. Coaching the drama from bitten figners. The worst kind of vulture. One that doesn't wait for death. She drew the numbers on the chalkboard. A random science. Of lies. Vaguely associated with the truth.

She wore no watch, but always knew what time it was. By how many yeses she'd utttered. By how loudly they yelled when she didn't want to listen.

Eager drums. Are content to be beaten. Calm red riding hoods seduce the wolf. With sealed picnic baskets only a child can take through the woods.

No more grandmother. Just sharp teeth. And big eyes. The better to see us.

The fairy tale is strong. Selfish princes kiss all the girls. The mortar is weak. On my straw house.

The time comes and goes. What remains is how. Thick her lips were as they parted to receive him. Mute ninjas with their swords against the chalkboard. The basic arithmetic of men. Subtract. Pragmatic orphans with their discount clothes glued to their skin.

The years speculate on who we were. Urchins on the side of the road. Peddling matches for a meal. Scientists selling sunscreen in a nuclear winter. The common math. Subtract.

Leave the doll in its cradle. Let the ghost make its noises. Pay no attention. Close the curtain. Ignore the crazy wizards that lurk behind. All roads home.

I already know the formula. Subtract. Count backwards until you don't know them.

Bald babies sick in their mother's breasts. Coy strangers at the entrance. Dominoes anxious to be pushed.

All we have to do is breathe.

Dead is dead. Isn't it? Like so many dreams suffocated by empty beds. The one-eyed teddy bear strangled by a child's love.

It's real. Isn't it.

Just a little math. Add the piss and subtract the shit. The skin is all that's left. Of vague epiphanies. The shards of candy that were her lips. Caught in my teeth. The wolf that huffed and puffed from inside the straw house. That was her pussy. All blown down. All the pigs devoured.

Only left. The lonely bricks still standing. An empty house. Fingerprints in the mortar disappearing as it cures. Saved. Not saved at all. The world outside it panting to get inside. The nothing inside it so calm.

Reasoning with the story. Certain it is hopeless. She goes back. Minutes. Years. On stilts made of flesh. She stands over it. Watching the ants toil. To ensure that nothing changes. She stomps. In her concrete dress. Waiting for it to harden.

She goes as far back as she can. And she tries. To manipulate the picnic basket. But no matter when she finds herself. She's always too late to change their minds.

You were close enough she warned. Warm ice above the flame. Melting fingers on the median. As if this road were determining. How the cracks in my windshield are to spread.

The boisterous hail. As time absolves. Men of their mistresses. Women of their hollows. The minutes. Skipping stones. Across an infinite expanse. Not your eternity. But long enough.

Quadrants. Pockets in the skin. Heavy with neanderthals and miscarriages. Places to go. Where the filth of time cannot follow. Soft beds. In the dirt. That cleanse. Sever the hand the from the trigger.

Funneling these heavy skins. Into the names we'll use against each other. When it hurts like it always has. The bombs on its last few seconds. Impervious to the mercy of hidden scars.

All the bullets are friends. All the nurses strangers.

When the enemy is all I know. Will I know when to forget.

Tasting his stale fingers. She assumed she was too late to the feast. Raw apples on the ground. Withering in the shadow of the tree above. She stood in the grin of the electric door and waited for the glass to yawn.

In or out seemed only a chuckle. Of greater gods. Or smaller men. She wasn't sure. If it even mattered which. Having spent so much of her life in those sorts of transitory paradises.

The glass does not break. When pounded by fists or swelled with tears. It only cracks. Reflecting us. As we have always been. Tired cells searching for the algebra that explains where they are going. Brittle claws chipping the paint from a wall of faces. That are always laughing.

Her skin trailing behind her. As she crawls. In spite of the logic. That would tell her to stop.

To wait for the moral to catch up to the girl in the woods.

Gravity on its stilts. Tall tendrils charm the fall. Small epiphanies in the assumption of cause. The dull, dull sparks. As we churn in our frail obsessions. Clutching the otherwise with numbing fingers.

The failing ease. With which the giant frees himself from his legs. Small again. Then smaller still. Until everything is far away. Dying clocks with their arms full of faces. I don't recognize.

The stubborn cold trickling through the window panes. Tiny monsters making her bed shiver. With absent fathers and recurring dreams. The arrogant zippers on their backs coming open. The things inside. So sure.

Duct tape and needles for the flower. Condemned to the sun. The rain. In random chokes. Fall like burning bridges. Splitting atoms. Content in their rampage.

She explodes. Gratified by the pieces. the machine is born with us. Back and forth. The molecules trip over each other. The switch is off. She names each ghost. The same. She calls them.

But none answer.

The switch is on.

I see myself. Through weak binoculars. I see myself. And I know. We will always be strangers.

Slow-acting poison charmed the flesh. With images of a world not yet ended. She punctured the tire. Knowing to go was a last resort. She drew on the walls in permanent markers. Hopeful the world would catch up.

Save me a minute. Barter me an hour. Choke the stubborn Spock's. That insist. A starship is required. To stumble upon a rift. In the space-time continuum.

He runs fast. Without his boots on. The amorous captain. Certain there is life somewhere. I took up their challenge. Life on Mars. I went there. A weak moon on my shoulders. I wasn't any different. Except they had to count slower. The light took its time getting there.

Truth be told, I always liked the dark better anyhow. Broken sieves. Trying to catch the pieces that always get through.

Portions she warned. Long wars require longer battle plans. Dead men in her pocket. Searching for the buttons. Woodsmen with their blunt axes. Turning the beast inside out.

To forge the fairy tale. As certain as the broken pencils with which I draw it. Time's impotent deputies struggling against when we are.

Weak men heavy with their solving atoms. Douse the courtyard in monochrome vomit. He weighs himself. For the millionth time. Peels the shipping label from his ass. And waits for the sounds of that idling truck.

Only witches know the spells we cast. Broken pencils and soft crayons turn hate into prophecy. It will be. It already has. I just need a chance to catch up. Then it will all make sense. Or at least I wouldn't have to remember anymore.

Those toothless wolves with their smelly paws fouling grandma's bed. Those poison apples that are much too red.

The barkeep on the end of the mahogany leers in my direction. Involuntarily dialogues proliferate in my head. I exchange my frown for a ghost. We forget our faces. Summon our poorest rituals. And submit to the strangers consuming us. I pay my tab and take the empty glass away with me.

The astronaut had taken his eyes off. And oh! The things he could see. Life of Mars. Gods in their diapers. Crying to be changed. The clock with its arms crossed. Insisting it was working.

The jack was holding the club. The queen on the table. He shut his one eye and said it had begun. Everything that has happened. It starts with this. Everything we've lived. And think we can remember. It's now. It's never. It always has been. It never was.

We woke up. Pale with knowledge. Deaf with fear. That everything was happening. All around us. Spacemen negotiating the horizon. As it steadily inches away. Dying stars. Their last light on its lengthy trip toward our eyes. Too late or too soon I wondered. As I began to write it again.

Astronauts and madmen are the only ones who know. Why we go there. Or why we would ever leave.

It's random and it's accurate. It's quantum and its mechanic. It's mad science. The ease with which touch overcomes. Paper knives and iron bandages. To keep alive these desperate ghosts. To keep dead everything else.