Sour apples. Lessons on her tongue. Bruised bananas. Allegories of her touch. The taste is inherent. To the time in which it occurs. The woman is a reflection of the timeline the child took.

The winter. In a trembling pause. Stops. Looks at her. And admits. The reason comes after the cause.

The ladder pressed against the window tries to convince her to climb. But she just looks down. Finding herself on the ground. Up here. There are many of everything. Up here. It's easy to see. Why the bottom is there.

Coaxing her Romeo's as the poison bellows in her abdomen. Trying to wake him. So he can see. It never mattered.

The future won't forget. The window doesn't open. I cup my hands to my eyes and look inside. There is nothing.

A day in amber dungeons. Moist walls and hard abdomens. A hell much too similar to paradise. Scales on the mountain weigh the space between here and now. Impotent epiphanies turn the child.

Letting the fire smolder. The soot is true. Burnt boxes warn the theives. That whore is dead. A summer of footprints. A winter of kisses. No one remembers. No one wants to. Except the headless goat. As it chews on her disappearing clothes.

The choice. The loud parade. As it shuffles through her hysteria. People. Faces. Rotten apples and used chewing gum.

All the things with skin laughing. At the girl who's misplaced hers.

Particles transitioning. Movement to touch. A subtle distinction, she asserts. As her blouse falls off.

That timid mule gravity pondering the weight. Of distant gods and intimate demons. The ground she insists is always far. Just look down. You'll see.

Yellow birds in their cages. Overwhelmed with songs. Feathers scraping metal. In a huff of clipped wings. Just like the people play on their broken instruments. Useless games. Amid a thunder of songs never written.

Particles. The smallest parts of how. This bounty of skin came to exist. Weights. The moments all around us. Like starving infants.

The hunger. Stray particles. The more I feed them the more they want. The time lines collapsing. Into each other.

One brave particle. Refusing the pull.

Bubbles blowing. Escaping our grasp. The world expanding. In infinite breaths. Change me she demands. And so it is done. New world formed. From the things undone.

The cork is in. The pressure builds. The fractions bicker over the fragments left.

After the explosion.

The dead men laugh. Content with the paradox. The bubbles grow. Wrestling against one another for a space in the universe. The clowns pile from their tiny car. Every one debating how.

Bubbles she insists. One growing from the next. Little cancers on the world. Pretending there is more.

Missing pantyhose beneath her skirt. Explaining how it's impossible.

Scolded by the obvious. Leaking windows and heavy shades. She pastes an hour on her chest and waits. For time to notice it is missing. She imagines her time machines in red and blues. But black and white is all she ever gets.

Symptoms she insists. Not to be treated nor allayed. But to lead us to the disease that causes them. Mother in their warm beds. Calling their children to witness them die. Time travellers hoping to quell this apocalypse called trust.

Righting the rose with thorns as measure. Stopping the locomotive with a handful of pennies. The impossible threatening everything.

The pretense she says is practical. When nothing is real. The paradox is necessary. To know you've arrived at the correct funeral.

Clay and dominoes. Staged for the fall. Counting aloud. Impetuous villains. Building cities in her wake. Ghosts and fables. Peddling the transition. In fractured stages. The bulk of the lesson is pain. Everything else is extraneous.

The skeleton is in pieces and there's no one else to blame. Pernicious gods on dead wings. Their dead stories selling saviors for next to nothing.

The balance beam. Strutting frowns. And lazy kisses. Pose the demon on the mount of heaven. Lost because there is no way out. Lost because the world out there is impatient.

Tiny keys trapped in their locks. Heavy switches keep the lights off.

The Weight. On both ends. Pulling us up. Dragging us down. The division. Then and now. A series of strangers. All trying to fit into the same ugly gown.

The particle. God on her fingertip. Too small to see. As fragile as the possibilities we've let infect us. As big as the worlds we've let swallow us up. Searching for the one in which we belong.

The oven. Waiting for heads. The future stalled on torn dresses. The kind she wore when the step was closer. The parachute. Waiting for falling. The ship waiting for ocean. The need for balance. Is most obvious. In the bandages on sore wrists.

Gods come and go. The corners are all we have. When those walls forget.

Two islands. One ocean. To drown us.

Everything breaks. The glass must follow.

Choices. Sad dominoes. Tumble toward. Obvious hysterics. Close the door. Start up the machine. The motor. In strips of velvet underwear. The portal. In the shadows on her stare.

The window. Weak partition. Dividing this world and the next. Jump. Test gravity. Determine it has failed us again. Too many forces. Stretches as stockings across the skin. The little in the choice. The big in the difference.

The wolf in its iron lung still threatening to blow me down. The piglets in their ramshackle houses. All the more afraid of nothing.

The sky out there. Like heavy sediment underfoot. As I wrestle against the physics. Of small men.

To know that we are sick isn't enough to make us better. To know that gravity is weak is not enough to break the fall.

Compelled by the disease. There's nothing I wouldn't do to please it.

The pencil. A long story shortened for our impatient audience. Dolls sewn to their mothers' backs. Fidgeting in the dresses they don't want to wear. The pageant passes. A little sun. A lot of darkness. Shames the numbers. As her counting pauses to acknowledge. Too many watts fiddling with too few amps. Power she suggests is not in the delivery, but the usage of what you get.

The lights not on. The door still opened. She says it's only habits. A festering infection of familiarity. The porch dark. The stairs empty. As she begins her ascent. Basements to attics. Old trees. And peeling paint. The measure of my sanity lost in the weightlessness of her touch.

The kettle on the stove. Heating, but not hot. The porridge in the bowl. Sweet, but not sweet enough. An avalanche of choices. And none worth taking except us. That backdoor. This broken glass in my fist. To squeeze. Pretend these four walls are enough.

Chemicals and sickness. Flaunt their grave paradise. It rains. Hard. Everyday. It's cloudly on the others. I can't see anything that isn't close enough to grab. I can't reach far enough to do that.

Dirty bones fill the porch. The dark rings her doorbell, but she refuses to answer. Dirty bones rife with the meat we should've eaten. Diseases under the skin playing cliched ballads on what's left of her fingers.

I find the stories in the ugliest of places. Where no intruder has ever ventured inside me. I find all the hiding places in this addiction we call living.

A circus. Of hungry rats and three legged dogs. Hard penises and soft hearts.

Love is sparse. Sex is dense.

And the world moves so slowly. That I almost want to save it.

Components of the whole. Sputter and soothe. To the quiet of the future. All absolutes abolished. Every proof denied. Years of hollow cocoons searching for their missing butterflies.

Keeping the math in small packets close to her chest. She manipulates the fractions. As a whore would a horny man. Choices, she confesses. Are made in the empty seats we save. For people who aren't coming back. I haven't built a time machine. It was an accident of sobriety and skin.

I haven't seen the future. Just been seen by it.

Bases of the fraction. Debating the circle. How many degrees. Her empty pockets paying the toll on falling bridges. Carving her triangles in the soil. Now that the mountains are not real.

The pattern is there. Her body is ready. To discover. Those stifling mysteries. That keep the tiger in its cage. That deprive the bird of its wings.

She is ready. She is prepared for what's out there. She opens the door, but is betrayed by the machine.

Angles. So many of them. Like leeches. Spoiling the geometry. Of when. Skin was linear. And I knew what to do with the circles between us.

Dancing with scarecrows. The unfortunate acumen of damaged persons. Flip and dry like picked flowers. Soil like lubricant between each delicate petal. Always waiting for dead things to remember us.

The lion on her porch. Warm fangs trace the pictures. The moon draws on the glass. When seeing through it is too difficult.

Tin men in their brick gardens. Begging for oil. Sediments and circumstance. Causing the balloon to pop. The atmosphere too harsh. Too close. I had forgotten what gravity was. Until that puncture appeared.

Now everything is so heavy again.

I busy myself picking up the pebbles. Little pieces of the boulder supply the choices. The bigger ones decide for us.

Sight being more desire than light.

Snakes on the stage. Performing. Disjointed dances. Stepping on the shadows. In hungry efforts to reassemble weak splints on brave bones.

Forgotten things. Obvious asides. From across the stage. As her dialogue dwindled. Pale monsters flirting with the curtain. That keep the darkness a stranger.

Trifling with madness in a rapture of sanity. Jasmine in the courtyard. Lilac in the passage. Stories she almost told. Faces she still sees.

The fail safe failing. As I stumble into her calm confessions. Loose stones in high walls. Bartering with obsession. Her awkward stare. Explaining everything the future didn't.

The butterfly is sneezing again.

Nothing there. Empty uniforms. She pries the god from his fist. Imaginary tutors for a dysfunctional man.

There is no god. There is no purpose. She tries to warn him. Baffled by his obstinance. There is nothing out there. Just space. In which to get lost. And the failed suicides of sober men.

My science laugh at your heaven. The charismatic dreams of dying men. I've seen inside those walls. Expressions of shame in their weak rebellion.

There's nothing out there. I've studied it all. Each empty chamber that leads me back here. And every rocket elevator that claims the future is ours.

There is no god. There's nothing to interpret except long dead suns. The barren beaches that lead me back to those musty old time machines.

With obvious buttons. And stagnant stairways. Abrupt with the truth.

There is no god. There is no me. No you.

There is only now. And the residual contrition of scarring skin.

Bubbles expanding. Strings entangling. A million universes. All the same as the next. Bubbles multiplying. Parent carbon growing distant. Bubbles breaking. Life takes up space. Space takes up time. And we have very little of it with which to play.

She'd tell my fortune in playing cards and empty candy wrappers. I was to live a thousand years and have several hundred wives. She'd say real was in my pockets. If I would only mend the holes. I'd find it.

Corks on the floor. Like basic arithmetic. Minus the flesh. Divide by when. Expansion. The bubbles. Becoming more of each other. The bubbles. Disappearing into the concept of multiplication. What is there. What is gone. All the same.

The universe. On its crutches. Chasing after. The empty bottles still repeating her name.

Open doors. On the side of the bed. Surge with recognition. For former mistakes. Open doors. Deep slopes in her freshly fallen skin. Hold those footprints for much to long. After that travelers have gone.

It's been so cold for so long. The ground is made of glass. The air is thin enough to braid. Loud footsteps approaching and long strands that tangle up before I reach the end.

No one I would've known had I not forgotten who I was. Cold porridge and empty beds. For girls lost in the woods. And the animals that come home to find them.

Cold swings. Carrying her away. On broken legs and frozen blood.

She tells me how in burnt arithmetic. But I'm only interested in why. She's still counting.

The influence of occasional villains. Plays softly upon the heroics of the victims. Burnt lips taste the sweet in the vinegar and the sour in the chocolate. The dark arriving in hiccups. Exiting in cancers.

Red balls. Choking down the stairwell. In alphabets of how. This chase has taken me so far from what I sought. The resonance. Eyes blinking. The obvious. Of falling. Still unclear.

Misplaced skin on the board. Kings cowering behind their castles. The bishop and the queen conspiring in summers that never existed. Commotion. Sentimental dolls crying over the poison under their nails.

Graves. Iridescent funerals. Passing through her grin. Bars. Empty tables. Passing for if. This impotent rubber band were real. And I could release it.

Break the pattern.

Listen to that same old song as if I'd never heard it before. At last touch the mask that keeps us apart.

Blame the stars. For taking too long for their light reach us.

The muscle on the bone. Whispers. How close are we now. The bookends of her lips too weak. To keep her stories from falling down. Memory. Like knives too dull to cut our meat with. They still manage to cut us somehow.

It was too much effort to follow the path. As she navigated a future without us. Diet soda and rum and too many cigarettes to counts. Birthday parties for the dead. And all this space suddenly not a vacuum.

Just clouds. And planets. Lost in the toil of distant suns. Heat and gravity. All those weak forces that often exert so much power. Dustpans and cataracts. As our vision fails us. Seeing by memories. Learning by loss.

The variances. The peculiar spread between if and when. Delicate butterflies sneezing inside the void of my fists.

The changes are negligible. The changes are catastrophic.

The changes are none

Dubious prisons. Flaunt severed limbs. It's too cold to wonder. How close we were. The world is particles. And we each some of them. Mailable eddy's in a whirlpool. Breathless wolves. Too hungry to care. About succulent pigs.

Swimming in the straw. Buried in the bricks. She swallows the fairy tale whole.

Pressing random buttons. Pulling on various strings. Going somewhere. In bits of nothing.

Her cloak. Her seldom speculations. Tempering the rush of wind. As the firefly chases its ass. And their blankets dissolve. Into endless winters. I tell her to be patient. But I'm lying again.

I talk to all our gods through the window's glass. And wait for one to answer us.

Bubbles she said. Half Accusing. The natural response to the release of the vacuum. Worlds apart. A fingertip away. Dead. Alive. All the same. When the universe is kind enough to multiply by obvious affections.

The cork in her grin. Ready to burst with anticipation. The universe in her words expanding exponentially. And I. Just the observer. Changing everything.

The tea kettle on the stove engorged with steam. Asking her how there can be this thing called heat. The knife in her hand. Cutting vegetables and meat. Curious what sharp means.

Bubbles she told them. Not really understanding. The physics of choices. The faintness of gravity. As it relates to the vanity of her struggle.

Empty cupboards train her voice. Pale beds teach her fingers. The forest is barren. Until someone is watching. Nothing is real. Until you are the observer.

Dull pitchforks pierce the bubbles. And we are helpless. Frightened observers changing everything.

I worked my way through the snow. A shovel full at a time. Bending down. Lifting. Hurling. In no particular direction. There was nowhere to go, but damned if I wasn't going.

Along the way I lent my eyes to a blind man. My ears to a deaf woman. The rest they took without asking.

When I got them back I could only see what wasn't there. Hear what hadn't been spoken. The rest I don't really remember using.

There were dropped matches everywhere. And dry logs still in the hearth. Silence on the radio too loud for them to hear. I was warm. And I was listening. As if nothing had changed.

I turned off the alarm and let them sleep. Knowing I was the only one awake. The match in her stockings aching for my flint. Ruby lips. All smiles. As the fire finds their frowns.

What I think I see. Is not out there. What I imagine I hear. Was never said. I am the deaf man. and the blind woman. The rest i don't remember.

Small charades reveling in bursts of fog. Memory comes later. With a callous blade of sun. To cut the clouds. Let the rain spill out of the sky's jagged uterus. Born again. Into a paradox of skin. That's reserved for touch. And the rest meant for wanting it.

A summary of cautions. Not unlike neglected children. Sleeping in the feces. I wake up to an absentee sun. Wondering why the clouds never listen when I tell them it's rained enough. I ignore the snow and pretend that the winter is feeble. A series of icy bridges. Leading me into the arms of strangers. Faces too close to the window. Turning ugly as I begin to dream.

A time machine. A weak trajectory. Vague numbers. As we covet. Stairs too steep. Climbing. Upward. Searching the empty spaces. As lightning hits the roof. These windows hopelessly scouting. For a world to show her.

All that glass breaking. As she finally wakes up.

Biographies in blue. Suffocate the skin. Reaching for that absent feeling. Of frozen soil and cold wind. Butchers cutting up the dead things we will eat.

The mania conform to patterns in the numbers. The flesh absolves to the level of the rising ocean. Dizzy Dorothy's taunt the lion. Tin Men play the martyr. While the wizard watches from behind his cloak. Stiff with dungeons still unopened.

Circumstance seems more an alien than time. Its weak abundance. Merely a distraction. There's so much still to do. And I've barely begun.

There are picture to be drawn. But my pencil always breaks. There is skin to touch. And there are drugs to do. And lies to tell. And I would. If there was anyone left to believe them.

She enters the darkroom. Film in hand. She trusts.

That there is no exit.