It's just clay. Stretched screen flirting with broken glass. The fireflies. In their rancorous utopias. Pausing between flashes. The sour petitions of frayed nylons and empty heels. Big empty ships. In a careless ocean. The precarious poke. As the chopsticks find the bone.

He answers. Though I never asked the question. He undresses. The same as any man would. In blunt stages. Like chewing gum. The sweet momentary. The rest indigestible.

It's not like I know. Or that I ever could. What makes windows appear where walls once stood. I only concern myself with counting the door knobs. Dead men with their fingers on the hem of her dress. Stubborn doorbells. Still ringing in her head.

She fiddles with the dial. Not believing. She watches lost knowing she is. Insisting they are all dead. She says time travel is like rain. Memory is the umbrella.

I closed the window. But it was too late by then.

These bottles weigh a lot. Especially when your hands are empty. These mazes. They talk a lot. But don't have many exits. We just play with the stone. At the perimeter. Asthmatic gods substitute flesh for medicine. We just point the needle in the right direction. It doesn't take much effort to facilitate this hopscotch games of skin. We take the stone. Hold it high above the game. And waste years laughing at those fool enough to play.

The monsters to Dr Frankenstein's genius. The flag to the corruption of the colonies.

I eyed the trampoline with a calm indifference. Wishing it was enough just to believe.

He cradles his monster as any mother would her infant. He closed the window. And listened to the rain. Certain time could be persuaded. To let the monster live.

Wearing the costume I sometimes forget. To take it off. That the seam is there. Its weak knot throbbing against the paradise humming within.

She never puts on her mask. Though occasionally she does take it off. Like bits of cloud searching for the raindrops in their piss. Heroes arrive in half written novels. And leave in their tattered capes.

I can't imagine why anyone would want to be one.

the atoms surge. And I can remember. Where I was going. For a moment. Or a little less. The fission pauses just before the explosion. To survey. Those that will be burned.

Time comes. In hysterical vomits. From her empty stomach. She wears its lipstick. pieces of meat on the tongue. negotiating constants. I'm there. In the puncture of the eye. As it dares to open. We hang high above this sharp net of time beneath us.

Shouting that it doesn't matter.

As the motor on this time machine wears down.

The burn of the sun. As it gnawed through my skin. Reminded me of sex with strangers. And drugs. The microscopic puncture in the surface. That devours the world. In broken pieces.

Afterward. The timeline stopped to think. About her fickle lovers. All the places. All the people. Space. A vast prison from which there is no escape. She told me time wasn't real. That we are all lost. In the nothing. A profound darkness in which only words can see. We pretend to feel. These deaf parasites. Because they prove there is something inside us.

I push the button. Awakening those metallic gods. Gears thunder. Devouring flesh. Time poses its riddles in roses and thunderstorms. I wait for the lights to go out. As the lightning hisses.

I see the future. In broken stopwatches. It's always too late. Or too soon.

Time she says to forage. Gaping wounds. Suffocate in little scraps of skin. The door slams. Ten times. Maybe more. She hears the sound. Sees no faces. The sun squeezes her from her dreams. Bits of pulp. Soil the floor. She is liquid. To be captured. She is vapor. The heat from their touch changes her. Gravity loses the war.

Now within these tunnels. Thin and sparse. Truth collapses. On its jelly arms. The matchsticks ignite. In a rapid cough. The fire reveals the skeleton. All the meat is gone. Devoured, but still my hunger persists.

She arrives in fragments of sleep. Bits of dream put weight on the nightmare. Salt in her grimace. As the words utter her in frantic inflections. The monkey with the Bible in her hand. Sees god in every page.

The moment splits. Angry atoms on the prowl. Parse the explosion. Insects. In the grooves of her flesh. Build their tiny cities. They live. While we perish. Everything I remember. Is a cold combustion. Igniting dead skin. Shadows tumbles through these mirrors I call eyes. I see nothing. Open circuits failing to animate the darkness.

I would endeavor to substantiate. Chunks of clay. Play with their faces. As I struggle to see them. It's only a button. Fingers like an elevator take me up. I've been there. I will be again. In the tunnels of ambivalent gods. Miracles like poker chips. Tumble into the pot.

It's always the same. The end comes quietly. In deaf arbiters. I struggle to match their bets. But never see their hand.

She was ready with her verbs. Clotted with blood. Tasting the world in dead meat. Oh. The inappropriate things we use to kill that hunger. I was undressed by child. As the silence took over. We counted. The years on our fingers. Until our markers ran out.

We are. And so the verb becomes us. In distortions of the moment. I trace the outline. With my pencil blunt. To discover the picture as empty as ever. I can't see. Nor have I ever been able to. Reconcile the sun with my experience.

We is. Or at least. She was. Closer to the tangent. Plastic fingers stroke the rain. As it falls quite oblivious. To the soil it saturates.

I Had my verbs all arranged. My adjectives in neat rows of lovers. It's a barren fairy tale. As any. All those manic machines set on pause.

I had the time machine in my palm. Ugly jesters manipulating the lens. I could write the fable with my eyes shut.

Reluctant gods struggle with the verbs. Taking full advantage of the adjectives.

It's hot in here.

It's cold.

She had her lye. She was dissolving her flowers. As all ghosts are wont to do. Given their peripatetic cause. The garden grows in wide footprints. The fist opens. Empty as ever.

Working the wall. In deliberate massages. She pauses to explain. The missing bricks. It's never complete. There's always a fissure. It's not now. We surf the numbers. On rigid flesh. Collaring the lion with the thinnest of leashes.

It's okay. Because I have low expectations.

She had her lye. Sick little stories groping for description in fractured adjectives. She had her fingers. To tease the lever by. In urgent stabs she demanded. To know why. It takes so long. To find. What was always there.

Just another answer he didn't have.

Why? She insisted. Why try on this skin that will never fit. Why draw those outlines you will never fill in. Why make it hard. When it would be easy. Why. leave that bread in the oven when you know that it is burning.

Because. Because you wish to destroy. Because. Because it's easier to let something die than to care for it. Because. Because love comes in doses of hate. And that needle is nervous at best.

I could tell all three pigs what to build their houses with, but what would be the fun in that. I could kneel on the floor of that grim house. Where time still pretends to know the whims of flesh. Bantering with the deaf gods a finger at a time.

Falling asleep in cages with transparent walls. Waking up in worlds where all the windows are gone. If I could go back I'd just warn them that they're wrong.

There is only so much time to climb those steps. When you fall. You fall alone.

It was just switches at first. Doorways with faulty locks. Letting us through. To worlds where we didn't belong. An awkward pantomime carved in proximity. Erased by distance.

I thought I knew every number. Had memorized them all. That I had mapped every crease my world. Sunken all the buoys that would keep me from drowning. It's just space. and time. Drifting in their dense employ. Tiny mechanics in our skin. Balancing an endless array of useless machines.

I found the portals easily enough. With a little undressing. Obvious prisons. torn cuticles. On that pointing finger. Just choices. We had to make. Because we're always stranded here. In between. The weak knees of the future and the past's broken crutches. The future. It changes. Depending upon the clothes you take off. The time machine. It's powered by lovers. Their smelting flesh. Metabolizing in the fever of touch. Egregiously consenting to the world we've created ahead of us.

In hungry stutters. The record skips us ahead. To where we can look back. Survey so much nothing behind us. It's all gone. Goes away.

Plastic fingers tremble against the memory. But the button on the time machine offers no response.

I gave him towels. Still, the rain was too much. We waited as the flame expired. So many possible lies wasted. We listened. To the shiver of the brakes. As the clutch engaged the engine. We chose. The sparks carefully. As our batteries met their contacts.

Just energy he said. To be channelled. Minute gods dancing on my fingertips. Nothing so impressive. They die too. We just can't see it.

And when I'm blind I always long to hear. Anything. When I can't see. The light only makes it harder. Her overalls. In thick squints. Finally coming into focus. As the darkness absolves. What is left of this sickness. Called sight.

I laid my pillow close to the wall. And listened. For the walls to crack. Too distracted by the villains. To close my eyes.

This metal skeleton bends easily. Breaks just as well. Moments explore the concept. Of the fairy tale. Words without constraint. Machines more ambition than progress. I thought lost. The wading pools scrape at the windows. Dense with touch. I can't see the engine, but I can hear it. The friction in vain iterations. A monster with no teeth. Chewing on the reamins. Of abducted children.

Come away with me she pleaded. I'm not there, but I'm finding it.

The ghosts. Obvious arithmetic. counting closer to the end. The taste. Of them. An empty fist. Punching out the peforations. That were always there. The future in vague prepheries. NOt to be trusted. I heard him say. How lonely it was. In the future. In the past.

She stuck the stick into the wheel. And waited for the world to stop. And when it did she wondered. As any child would. How she could make it want. What it had never had.

Subtraction she explained. Is very much like physics. We open the windows. And wait. For the rain to find us.

The coiled snakes. In their mediocrity called additon. Presume to add to this puzzle we call skin.

The obvious arithmetic worries her senses. As she measures the margins. I can draw. Latent stick figures in the sediment. But I cannot make them listen. When I warn about the temptations. To prove it is ours.

The antidote. She insists. Is colorless. Since she knows that the world is drawn in outlines. We plunder through our petty bits of progress. Windows moist. And attics empty.

As those shadows start to name us.

She flaunts her paradox. In lingering colors. Close enough she whispers to herself. As the moon lurches into to her orbit. A fairy tale. In broken English. A love story in curls of chocolate. I can taste so sweetly what has happened. So bitterly what never will.

I find the road in my blindness. I can feel the traffic in my fingertips. The rush. Strangers on their journeys. Monsters under my bed. Trying on their people faces.

The grim of the stories blossoming. In petrified totems. Her toes on the ladder. As the ceiling comes into focus.

Dead things on the wall solving the conundrum. Going with the wolf. Ravaging the picnic basket. Dead girls on grandmother's porch. In pretty dresses. Big fangs in her bed. Biting down hard.

Hey you. No. Not you. That other guy. A little to the left.

Three days later the cake was gone and the moon was in her throat. Making all her words heavy with gravity and kinetics. The stop sign came out of nowhere. A sudden scar on her thighs. I turned left and played with the limits of lsot for too many miles.

Hey you. No. Not you. Him. Yes. No. Wait.

The coin dropped. The machine spat up cordial songs and faint gallops of rhetoric. Moist lounge chairs stuck to her flesh. As she tested out a darker complexion. It was hot. And she was looking to burn. It was over and she was looking for a sequel.

Hey. You. No. Not you. A little to the left. Stupid men. I'm not looking at you. You're too predictable.

Wait. What's this. My hungry ferris wheel. That always pauses at the top. It's not as tall as I thought it was. I can see so far. But still not far enough.

I could jump. Tame this machine once and for all.

The closest link comes and goes. In the theory of the constant. She draws on the sun. Dark sketches. That bring the bright light into focus. It's far. It's near. It's the virus that slouches this flesh into its empty cradle. We heal. We cure. In tainted breaths. Cyanide skins opens ups for an ugly trial.

So I tie the knot tighter. As reality soothes to sin. The puppets mouths move, but no words come out. We shuffle the deck. Bits of skin interact. While the machine begins its lengthy boot.

The girl in the stockings bend over. To let the costume slide into place. Over her head. The child in the boots looks down. Toe tie the bow on the monster.

I'm there again. And waiting on their pitchforks.

It's dark enough she says, but the machine disagrees withe her.

I had no eyes. The demon on all fours. Its tail wagging. I couldn't see anything. Except her hollow heaven. I'd sneak in sometimes. Drug up the saints. And leave. Because they're always so fucking sober it makes me sick.

I don't know why. Her dresses never fit. All I remember are her shoulders. How the excess fabric always makes her more beautiful. Small words on gaping pages. To be scrutinized. Until they can disappear again. Content. In the waning oblivion. That inevitably follows.

Don't test. Just jump. He goaded. It's just liquid. And all your pieces will float. But it's not enough. The surface is so anticlimactic after all these years holding my breath.

I'd rather suffocate. At least that would be dramatic.

It always ends in little bombs. Frail explosions. That tear the paper, but fail to move the men.

Trying on the conveyor belt she wondered what the machines would make of her. Now. And then. This obvious convergence. Happening to us. At every breath. The callous mathematics of skin. Constantly subtracting from the sum.

Now. and Then. Feeble guesses on the continuum. Fluttering. Faint butterflies. Pressing their wings too close to the sun. It always rains. It never does.

Thoughtless gears and habitual pistons. Cutting that same die from so many different women. Those moments abandon us. As we flirt with bored gods. Real comes with beveled edges. The heavy rain comes only after the drought has been exhausted.

It's always why. It's always when. The machine is always there. The fuel comes later. I can't tell time at all. It's different in every instance. Dirty curtains cover the windows. That pretend to know the world out there. Greasy finger prints soil the knob on the door. That doesn't go anywhere.

It always rains. It never does. When you're travelling time. And when you finally decide to stop. It's still the same.

It's always raining. It never is.

Stubborn chalkboards cling to the dust. The monster. In his tattered dress. Asks her to dance. The tired musicians. Continue to play for them. Though the song is old. They dig their own graves in the pillows.

Arguing with blind devils. Over theoretical hells. The allure of dead bulbs. To the decay of skin. The disease must come first. And then the cure can be discovered. That is the nature of touch. Or rather, the feeble way it can be used by creatures. too weak to harness.

Bitter ghosts rape the porch lights. Ugly dogmas rig the switch. The perfect time machine is one that doesn't work at all, but convinces you it has. A chorus of redemption far away enough. That all this dying seems appropriate.

Warning the duckling. In softer words that she can usually muster. Adjusting the gape of heaven's maw. To let the demons live. Just a little longer.

Until it's safe to die again.

Finding those colors in the dark. Determined. To prove they still exist.

I'm coming she called. As we took off toward the storm. Chasing each raindrop. As it seduced the stars.

Fiddling with her buttons. Adjusting her dials. Pieces of the doll. Arranged in the coffin. It's hopeless. It's nothing. The yolk passing between. A broken shell. The how. The engine. Idling. The accelerator. Pressed under her indifference. I'm coming. I'm almost there. Wait for me.

Her skin. Wrinkled pages. Occluding the pen. Her skin. turning. In chapters. Yet to be written. Folding stairs. And empty attics. Solving for zero.

I'm coming. I'm coming. I'm almost there.

Tantrums of flesh chase the puzzle pieces. Blank eyes put them together. So many buttons to press. So many numbers. To satisfy the machine.

I'm coming. Wait for me. I'm getting closer. To the edge. Dead grandmothers. And the wolves in their beds. Fouling my picnic basket. Big eyes. Bigger teeth.

I'm coming. Those big teeth are beginning to make sense. I'm talking to the broken glass. In cracked fortune cookies. I'm coming. I'm getting there. In sinking ships.

Wait for me.

Standing directly under the moon. Wearing the bed with a vigilant ease. She drew circles with her fingers. On the canvas of his silence. Too close she whispered to herself. Too dark perhaps. Weathered the debate in her head. As they outlines quickly came and went in a quiet storm.

No faces. TO embrace in the pillow of touch. No silhouettes. To rape in the savage of lust. Just gauged pages. Scarred with invisible ink. And the gnarled pencils that make their graves beneath.

I could wear this nothing for as long as it takes. The perpetual windows that endlessly thrill to the outside. Out there. Where everything is different. The glowing buttons. That always promise a different picture.

The stoic glass that stands there. Between. Her worlds. Underwear at its feet. Deciding what she'll see.

She always assumes it's not listening.

The Voltaire's and the Homer's pluck on their infernos. She counts the rings. The math stutters. A light coming on slowly. Insignificant shadows in its wake. Disappearing.

You can't rush the illusion that is sleep. Random needles poorly stitching broken seams.

She was conversing with the alien. In dribbles of calculus. Fragments in the continuum colliding with the present. Drawing the stairs. In thirty six degrees. The amphibian. Solving the salt in its lungs. After the race is lost.

She tried on every gown. And each sparkling necklace. She fell asleep wearing them. Only to wake up naked.

You can. You really can. Draw pictures on the sun. If you're willing to go blind.

You can You can. Really work the time machine. If you press enough buttons.

The patron and the poverty of skin. Disrupts my assassins. Thumbing through the hollow photographs. This flesh has developed. The pictures behind broken glass. Tell a different story. Than the lens that first mistook. Apathy for freedom.

It woke me up too early one morning. The dissonance of retrospect. A collision of arrogant gods. Each with their own paradise to market. I spent my morning stripping the barbie dolls. My evening selling them on a conversation I wished had never happened.

The hard lines of their flesh were beautiful, but impossible to trust. My shoes at the door squeaked of storms long ago passed. That the ground had not yet forgotten. She would query the machines. In the space between the raindrops. As if she was sure. It would never stop.

Easier she told me to be the void.

The future she assumes is expressed in words not said. Awkward grabs punctuated by too many drugs. Time she contends is a surface. And travelling it is mandatory. The warm composite of skin on the jagged terrain of the hours. Solidifies the dominion of touch. The silence comes readily. Amid the loud voices in her head. Deaf lips trace the path of screaming fingers.

I was that close once. In failed contraptions not yet labelled. In heavy oceans sick with sand. We looked for the shells.

Do you hear. The waves crashing? As you hold the hard skin up to your head. Do you test the echo. Rub the tarnished grin for traces of when. Dark still mattered. And distance could still be calculated.

She assumes the past in absolutes. Trains violently following their tracks. It's easy to travel if you're willing to be shaken. She finds the future on the empty shelves. She had been saving for something better.

The bellman in his navy slacks stood looking. At the orange peel in the drain. The hours combust. In lenient explosions of skin. Salient stories to be told to the under garments left flat upon my death.

She nudges the clock. Frightened that it's been asleep this long. Teasing the dinosaurs as time manipulates her empty uterus.

Division comes in sharp epiphanies. The whole is a lie. The pieces survive us. To charm the window.

Still they open to nothing. Just as they always have.

Mute monkeys with big sticks in their hands. Looking for something to beat.

We fall up. We fall away. We try on the future with bullet holes in our knees.

The ceremony is not in the act. It's in the violation. Warm schism elongates the fetid paths. She grabbed her spare levers and stroked the motor hot. Calling it knowledge.

drugging the future with needles from the past.

Shifting the mirrors. The words all in reverse. I've been. She coughed. Seeing when. A grim layer of animation. Flushing her back into the center of the desert. Thirsty, she gulps the sand.

the timeline surges. In ripples of skin. We arrive. Here again. Wherever that is. With sand in our underwear. And no shoes on our feet. Counting. Still trying to determine. How many places we've been.

To prove the future is real.

They bite. Leaving only the itch behind.