I didn't watch that movie at all. Sat there. Through the whole thing not knowing which was real. Me or it. It was hot outside. And in. I could count my breaths. Because I had to conserve them. I could feel them running out. Didn't know what to do about it.

I didn't let you undress me. Not with your eyes nor with your hands. But the holes were still easy enough for you to find. Any hole is a place to put your penis. Any hole is to be manipulated. To the fullest extent.

I didn't drink at the bar. Instead I just watched him. As he taunted the time machine. Bits of skin from his wrist to ante. To play a hand he'd never had. Pressing buttons in the dark. Naming villains after gods. Laying down in my bed. A fading erection lost without its vagina.

The words deaf on his lips as I feigned to listen. The picture stalled in his eyes as I pretended to look. For an exit. The story turned. And the pigs took off after the wolf.

Every fairy tale has a time machine. But very few of them work.

I promised to find him after we'd finished filling up our respective hole. I meant at the time. But this machine we call trust is such a fickle host.

I barely saw the movie and then it was over. We slept as close as two strangers can. I could go back. The piglet in wolf's clothes. Except that there is no house left to blow down.

Perhaps we'll start again with this straw.

Taunts the arbiter in stabs of reason. Us then. Bound to those dissident atoms. Chance. In more mutations than I can defer. A clock ticking on fading shadows. The robots scream their faulty code. In numbers. Dates. Empty epiphanies. The machine tries so hard to access the flesh. But always the connection fails. Until this side of the Earth turns away from the sun again. We sit in the darkness side by side and pretend the world is as small as it seems.

Caught the cat with the mouse in his jaw. Another gift from dead men. Save the timeline for later inspection. Nothing lives in that vacuum. Or if it tries it fails.

I assumed it was obvious. How I felt. The deep graves waiting for their corpses. The shovel blunt with my callouses. The hole. To be dug. Still digging. The void. As worlds perish. Still digging. Under the dictatorship of these angry molecules.

It's never deep enough. The dead don't listen. When the time machine is broken. They just use it anyway.

The ghost on her precipice. Ponders the distance. Between then and now. Obsolete semantics conjure defeated gods in their stained nightgowns. What once was heaven is hell now.

The truth professes to know what it wants. In awkward stabs at primitive ethics. It was easy to manipulate them. And it still is.

The piglets with their houses to build. Wear the fairy tale on their brow. The forest. With its abundance of trees still sees her somehow. Her empty basket. Her red hood. Poorly managing her breasts, As strange fingers ensue.

The tin man looking for the heart he's always had. She wakes him. To ask. Is it different now.

Her sour sojourn was sweet with rye. As the stammer of touch unfolded. In bent syringes and shattered medicine vials. The valve confessed. It had kept nothing out. She reluctantly admitted to liking that.

The pedestal buckling under the weight of her stare. As she asked him. What it meant.

The dirty paper stabbed under the point of her pencil writhing for colors. She contemplates the forest. Forgetting the trees. She says it's nothing. And it is.

Wilted flowers on the patio where she steps. Yawn the sun in dismal coughs. She chokes down the medicine. And waits. Too long for it to take effect.

She wakes the monsters. Everything is relative. She wakes the monsters and hopes for the best.

More words. Like stinging bees. Ripping themselves apart to break free. Oh. The sting is only the kiss. First taste. Of forbidden things. The drone bravely pierces her skin. Only to find. Little underneath.

I could judge the war. I would any. On the basis of merit. What is saved. By so many deaths. I could judge myself the same way.

But flesh is not a battleground, so much as it is a strategy. Some will die. This is certain. Eventually time arrives. Replete with its malfunctioning devices. And I believe it.

Pieces shifting. Elongated square. As the board trips in and out of vision. A perfect trap. For the moment we've lost. Staring at the ocean. Wondering why. We listen to the sand.

Trying on those broken lullabies. Bribing the dark. With blunt pins.

Balloons in the sky. Flaunting their strings.

My fingers. Still grabbing at what's gone.

The color. The torque. On absent resolves. Fetches the ghost. From its grave. And we are born. To want. Pointed heels. The precision of touch. Propagating ambivalence. The margin. As the wolves would refer to it. Circumspect. In the evolution of skin.

Dead things. Dead things she says are all around her. In the fingers and the limbs. The tooth and the digest. The window that the glass. As the outside seeps surreptitiously in.

I wake up on the edge of the bed. Unsure where I've been. The travels. The time. Ticking. A zealous Geiger counter. Measuring the weight of my skin more than the thickness.

Whispering to the clock. When the hour is ripe. Stealing the fruit from its vine. As the seeds begin to sour. Listening to the alarm I cannot hear. Deafened by resolve.

Alone in this madness. Found by my future. Forgotten by my past. Searching for a god that never was. Bent over. The puzzle. Consumed by the paradox. The solution comes to me and I ignore it.

The picture toils in redundancy. Until I can forget myself.

The margin is however near we are. The edge is honed. Trust the circumference of the darkness as it fattens. Let the strays bark, but never feed them. The particles accelerate. As she lean in toward. The missing manuals for this body of mine.

Empty blackboards etched. Certain answers and problems cannot disappear. Chewing on colored the chalk. Like candy canes. The dead decide to let us forget. But I still want to know what solves as x.

the future in broken sentences. writes itself. poor transcriptions of the things we've said. tell us what to say. now that there is nothing left. I never found god. so I just made one up. His heavy made of dirty cinder blocks. And phone number I've long forgotten.

The more I die the better I live. Anemic gods begs for my blood. While I wonder. How they are superior to me.

Love is all thumbs. Fumbling with the delicate order of words and skin. I drop everything. And wait to be caught.

She gathered her chalkboards. Past and future. Each one too tall. Beating together erasers. Until what had been written was choking her. I don't need to breathe. When it's this dark. I don't need to feel. When we're already this close.

The markers land in momentous stabs of angry atoms. I've been here before. Too many times. I won't be coming back. To see the world end.

This flesh. My perpetual time machine. Boasts of the wolf will his belly cut open. Dead things crawl out of the wound as alive as ever. Stories linger in the sway of the blood. As it writes on this used up paper we mistook for touch. Vindictively cataloguing each minute we've left it to rot.

Her toes swell on the treadmill. Time has set under her. She steps off the device. Just long enough to prove. It's not going anywhere.

The monster between her thighs was priest enough for any funeral. Her pussy like a curtain. Between the acts. Of a play almost written. It's just sex she said. An on ramp. To the highway. Where time moves quicker. And skin answers our questions. In lingering essays.

Reasoning with the Devil will only amount to so much heaven. Enough she thought as she kneaded his chest. Alone is carnival enough. The world bastes in shallow poisons. I am infected too. But some die quicker.

I chase the coyotes. With the skin in their teeth. I push against the angles. Still the geometry remains.

Stiff in the palace of her empty dresses. She tries on each disease. Assuming something will fit.

I wake up in old words that hardly make sense. Ugly conversations we had with ourselves. Huddled in a musty closet. Bent over a stack of atoms. That too closely resemble. The patents I once held on certain men.

I was never pretty. Pit bulls seldom are. But I got what I wanted for a time. And then I grew tired of the burden. People want so much for the little that they give.

We drew the stick figures. Bald bed sores contemplate smothered skin. We draw the pictures. Thumbing through the pages. Still shocked when they come alive. This weak autism loses us in each other. Three is too many. Two is not enough. I don't know physics. Except how it manipulates. Blinking graves. The dead tend to say too much. My flaw is that I listen.

I don't know how to travel time. Or that it is even possible. But I have seen the evidence. Men pale on the hem of their demons. Devil's locked in the stalemate of touch. I've been. And gone. I've tried to reason with the numbers.

It happens. Everyday. I add. They subtract.

Until we are back to nothing.

Her skin like cinema. Quick to tell. Impossible to edit. Saved its stories. For someone else. Her touch was patient. As it sought the tortoisee.

The white coat on the rabbit stifling its tail.

The running. Daft parades scream the larva in various stages of growth. Life cycles. In loud grunts. From an empty engine.

The world is small from this distance. Little men with their wagging penises. Imagine their time machines. In humming pussies and failing urges. The moment is the drug. As she rolls her shoulders.

Woken up. Somewhere she doesn't belong. Chasing numbers that don't add up.

I'm naked again. Dowsed in the sweat of malfunctioning machines. Like a hungry wolf. Huffing and puffing at laughing pigs.

The bad girl pushes the door closer to the window. And then she cries. For all her broken sticks.

It wasn't soon enough, but I tried to pretend there still were. Tall candles in those hollow pumpkins. Yellow eyes not blinking as the world comes to an end.

The girl tried on her costume. In rippling beige tragedies. Her mask bleeding from all angles. Her cape too close to the hangmen. She drew her bullets in crayon. Her blades in pencil. She argued with time for merely the practice.

Super heroes in torn tights. Selling their capes for biscuits and cornbread.

It doesn't make sense at all unless you turn off the lights. Fall asleep eyes still open to the choke of the train. As it shuffles passengers. Away from. And closer.

To nowhere.

Time arrives in its stalwart pantomime. Feeble gestures. Corrupt the silence. With loud gods. The words suffer. The years fetch. Hollow dolls. To justify. All the dead things. That are conjured up.

When it's over. You'll be sorry then.

But I won't.

A long laugh and then that endless nothing. That always makes it all seem the same. So pointless. As time travels me.

Useful enough. On the dark side of that empty shelf. Where the moon sours in fits of blood. Paper dolls. With their eyes still to be drawn.

Fantasy for certain. The pendulum in her head. Counting hours long since elapsed. The footprints on the floor. A blurry map to a missing treasure.

The door locking quietly as she let go of the knob.

The girl in her high heels strutting with the fading song. I was there once. Duct tape and bloody fingernails painting pictures on her missing panties. The devil with a pitchfork made of glass. Begging someone to break it.

the atom expands. Steps and ladders to the science. Of dying things. And those that will not live.

Her lipstick chosen. Her fingers melted to the button. The places moments go. Where we can't chase them.

The empty shelf. Heavy with so many possessions.

She bled from her crotch. In pale hysteria's. All volume. No play. She teased the suitcase at the foot of her bed. Other worlds. Hardly waiting for her arrival. A warehouse of fait accompli. In damp pillows under her brow. As she gathered her sticks and stones. To build a fire in the rain.

It's clear enough. The stain on her underwear. The art of a woman. The press of the man. Second-rate Picasso's erupt from her skin. Strangers choke on the meat. Lovers feast on the bones.

Broken heals well enough. Empty is not so fortunate. She knows that I love her. But I don't.

She bleeds. In urgent spasms. She turns red. As the fruit dies in her fist. Permanent scratches in the glass. The world is different now. I see more. And less.

She begs the time machine to stop. But it continues to ignore her.

She says it doesn't hurt. But the future knows different.

farther still. If such a thing were possible.

The dead dogs with their loose leashes. Shit the yard in quick consent. The atoms. On her eyelids. Blink slower. Now that she's found herself. I has the ghost in my palm. Terminals at the back of the throat. Coughing up brighter lies. The quixotic euphemisms of skin. Not lost. Only misplaced. Until I can find a new logic for this chaos.

I wrote to her. In short notes that should've been deleted. I said things. I should not have said. Only because I wanted to hear them.

Farther yet. As if this mania is something new. I saw. As any artist would. gods in broken men. Blind goddesses with their gowns on backwards. Little children with too much to confess.

I asked her. With a time machine warming on each wrist. Far enough? I admitted to her. In skipping breaths. I couldn't understand. The difference between then and now.

I just keep counting as the triggers in my head insist. Seldom anthems. Plebeian redemption's. Resume the clock on dying men. I don't know. Can't imagine. Tell me. Are you far away enough to see me yet?

Don't you wonder. About broken clocks on the wall. The claws in the cat not hanging on. Won't you ask. About the crayon on her tongue. Looking for color in discarded panties.

I woke up. Accusing the wrong judge. I opened my eyes and it was the future. I was no one.

The weary damsel kissing her ugly princes. The boulders rain like a blizzard. The motor hums on my time machine. But I don't go anywhere. The toad sticks out its tongue. The fly is caught, but the larva live. I tease the monsters. That construct my nightmare. A little closer. We're almost there. Snapshots. The cadence of skin. On dying treadmills.

I see the demon close. Acid. Her cunt. Negotiates the circumstance of how. Blind dolls cut her lips like blunt scissors. On blank walls. Heavy arms. Toting the future in bundles. Lay them down near the fire. The paper unfolds. Drowned in ink. Still empty. Catches on fire.

The future. In skipping records. Serenades a wayward child. The future writes to her in broken sentences. Stories she's already been told.

The machine moves her. Though only the weakest parts. She talks to it. Where am I she asks. Nowhere. Every place. Someone you'll never be again.

Foxes on their tiptoes. Draw the pictures she'll never color in. The darkness. Content to use her.

As the numbers fade.

Reveling in the gluttony of careless strangers. Her eyes big billboards desperately selling what she didn't have. Buses stopped in traffic. To pick up the aliens and to let them off. A bottleneck of empty cars caught behind it.

The first taste is candy. Hard and sweet. Mummifying my tongue. The next is adrenalin. And Defibrillators. Savaging wrenching death from the ghost's frail skin. I look at their faces and see more worlds than I can fathom. I crawl inside that tiny chamber carved into my head. Building clocks with needles. and empty dresses.

I see the frames one by one. Feeble animations. Impersonate the flow of blood. stuttering veins choke on the oxygen.

If I should forget how to breathe. some part always remembers. If I leave. Some rogue particle steals the future back. To where it began. The now with its heavy sledge hammer easily dismantling all my arrogant machinations. As I search for that one blade of grass. that exists both here and there. Reaching my hand into the portal. Feeling it disappear. Where we found out the obvious had been misleading. And pushed that square through the circle. Perhaps it will reconsider.

It's because I can't tell where I am. It's mechanics. The engine runs on gas. Back and forth constantly. Until now is all we're left with.

Bare feet on the pavement. As the traffic lights tease. There's something on the other side. But I can't get to it.

The sky is falling. But no one believes me.

She stood. Her finger poised over the reset button. Dead things on both shoulders. And arms numb. From digging too many graves. Everything to undo. She contemplated. Alone again. Alone the same. How much would I lose. Of this nothing I've come to trust.

The future in its skinny jeans. Hips hanging over the top seam. The future. Arrogant drugs. That profess to make me better. Multiplying frailties. Dividing by passions. Every person is a canyon. Every touch is an echo. I'm at the edge. And it all comes back at me. Just a fraction of what is was.

I tease the sober gods with bits of linear logic. I stumble upon myself and ask them where is your plan now. Monsters escaping their closets. And crawling out from under our beds. Everywhere there are ghouls. I can close my eyes and fall asleep, but I still see them.

I write on the wall for her to see. I am here. Or will be. It's a tangent. This mediocrity of skin. I argue with the hours. Over where it happened. That we stopped. We're still going it says. But I am there. And I'm not leaving.

Any time soon.

Even before we find it. It's already over.

Too Far away. Myopic thumbs overlook the subtle stages. Too close. Obtuse voices churn moments into years. I'm the tortoise. Moving slowly. As fast as I can. I'm the hare. running so fast. I can't see. Don't care. Where I'm going.

It's empty. This ledge. An endless Faustian stairway. With no place to step. Clocks that won't listen. And skies too limited.

I don't dare guess how this is where the story tells. All the minor tales that could make it whole. I don't stand on the rooftop to see closer the stars. But rather, to better see down. I don't want to fall. I just want to see.

Petitioning the monsters from within their sour. The bricks on my house eventually blow down. It's the structure. Not the materials that keep the villains out.

I'd give away all my baskets. For a wolf with sharp enough claws. The quantum mechanics of a jejune fairy tale wrongly trust the faulty algorithms of love.

Lost in number four. The moon on all five legs. Crawling across the glass. Toward the door. In a vociferous dance. Bare feet and shimmering gowns persuade her nightmares to whisper. Though the dream is loud.

Go to bed. Go to bed. The world doesn't notice.

Rid me of this time machine she wails. This constant catapult under my flesh. The more I move through time the harder it is to want what I've left behind. Shouting graves and woeful ghosts press the buttons on a dying host.

You're already there the walls say. Inside that box. And gone from us. A mad biography of someone who never was.

Lost at four. Found at five. She tries on the blunt malaise of touch. The fruit boasts its thorns. She bleeds well enough. The moon convinces those windows to open. She sees nothing.

But the nothing is closer.