We waited for the lights to come on. Drinking and taking sleeping pills. Talking to each other in riddles. Making tea and pretending to go to sleep.

Watching the world surrender a snowflake at a time.

Calling the monsters by name. As all fables are given to point out the obvious.

All these poisons are too weak. The morning always finds me alive again. All these swords are too fragile. They break again the thrust of my skin. Leaving merely indents where the fatal wound should've been.

Selling stems to disenfranchised flwoer petals. Toiling dead gardens. For new approaches. To this extraordinary abysss.

The fruit on the ground. Blaming the tree. The white in the air. Condones my blindnes. As I instruct my eyes not to see. Shovels and sages. More accuracy than compassion. Pencils and scissors content in their wisdoms. Of wrsits. And scars. And other such obvious treasons.

I wasn't waiting. I just thought you might like to come along.

Where walls collide. Like torn paper dolls And fingers break against the calm. Of nervous blades. Too close to cut.

Imdebted to these suttering mountains which let me see.

Everything.

I bite into the world. Prepared for the sour. Stunned by the sweetness.

Waiting for the wind to listen kept her busy. The things it would say not so much. The catapult on the back of her thighs. Straining. To contain all that violence. Miles of skin. Blank chalkboards. Begging to be scratched.

Causality and collusion in volunteering her thoughts for experiment. One time line. Then two. Then a hundred. A universe of champagne spoiling over her lips. LIke beads of sweat down the backs of burdened men.

Death comes not in the somber garb we assign it. But with a humor and a sarcasm befitting our narcissism.

Talking to the wind in obvious metaphors. She's not surprised when it asks her how long it has been.

It doesn't matter what has happened. A thousand times we've already done it. What's the harm in doing it once again.

It's always winter. The cold doesn't forget. Stolen skins. Nor the things that died inside them. It's just snow. Until it isn't. And we shiver inside our empty houses. Telling stories about how cold it gets. In all this darkness.

With the windows open.

It gets warm sometimes, but the cold is never too far. We sweat. We chase the hot air as it seduces idle fists. Dirty mannequins. Lost in a world of windows. Seeing nothing. Seen by everything.

With the window open it's not as cold as it was. The world in heavy gulps. The chapel at her throat. Gods scrambling for understanding. Of the glass. This portal. This dismal throne. Through which everything submits. The winter. In failing prose. The snow in drifting poems. It was always this cold. I'm only now noticing.

How long the winter is.

She woke up to hare. Had fallen Asleep to the tortoise. Anyway. It's all the same she said. Neither is going anywhere. Apple cores and banana skins toy with her discretions. A little house. Amongst many. With the lights out. With the meaningless people sleeping inside it. Dreaming up reasons to live another day.

The patterns. Poised on her crotch. The numbers. Obsessed with her cough. Little diseases. Finding for the motion. In dead things. Stopped escalators. Painfully close to the top.

Tall nets between them. As they pass the game back and forth. In a series of clumsy overhands. Idling in the hour. The year. The minute. The last part of the story pausing to finish.

The last of the bricks fallen down around the pig.

The angle of the sun ripe to burn us.

Two stones hit the Earth. Each one from a different world. Each one a different size and shape. Two stones. one hole.

Pebbles and math. In variances. Of potential means. Beneath the skin. Observers spoiling the experiment. The contiuum. Barking lovers on the edge of the bed. Tease the martyrs from squeaking hinges.

Instigations. Rotting fences. Sing their lullabys. To complacent infants in the garb of men.

Two stones hit the Earth. One is broken. One is whole. She carefully inspects them both. And decides the difference is in her. Not them.

She leaves me all the time, though still I see her there. The broken porches. The idling engines. Of predators without their claws. Light bulbs. Incandescent. Positing their measures. As her ass tips the scale. Writing her stories with a fingernail to the chalkboard. Falling asleep to tamazapam and old reruns.

I listen for the wind. As it pushes more things away. I wonder how the winter manages to go on when everything hates it.

The little birds in their tall trees. Telling their lives in broken eggs. The perception of the wolf. Is that he has eaten. Though no pigs are consumed. The reality of the worm is that the Earth is moved. Though still he remains in darkness.

The antonyms still evolving as she makes her way through the grimoire. Shuttered closets tease the skin. With long division. And monsters whose faces are too familiar.

The arrow waits for its moment. As her heart tumbles on. Avoiding the measures of time. Like a child escapes it bedtime.

Awake and wondering. What these walls keep out. What they keep in.

She is left with. Obvious strangers. And the years it took. To forget them.

Touch and all its grim dictators. Selling their time machines. As if anyone would want to buy them.

I catch him. Conspiring with corpses. Failed auctions in the when. Tires still turned. And knowing knew us first.

She cautions him about the fire. But he knows nothing of the burn. Her scars only encourage him. She makes her cuts in the paper. Assuming the shape will emerge. She follows the creases. Determined to prove. The truth waits for us to decide when its useful.

I lose him. In the future. I find him in the past. But the now. It has nothing, but regret.

Pawning our steps for doors we'll never open. Cutting off our legs to prove. It wasn't the distance. That left us stranded.

Uneven parables betray the lessons. The window is open to nothing. The glass is broken. Tall ladders fever the clouds. With suspicions of rain. The weather is us. As we tiptoe through the weakening thunder. The parallel suggests. Burnt ends. Raw middles. Tender with blood. As we feast anew.

Red numbers in the dark box tell their secrets to skin. Worms multiplying beneath her flesh into thousands of itches.

The junction. Her acquiescence. The fuse always there at the base of her thighs. A universe of sparks yet to ignite. A parable. A window open. The glass choking on the darkness it has bitten.

A caution. Like coiling satin at her ankles. The throttle of decision pauses the wind. And she can see. All the pieces to be collected. And those that are to be left behind.

The proposition. Not assuming. The cost. In variables. In new time lines. The future suffocates. The pasts we imagine were our own. The graves between her breasts telling stories about. Monkeys. Victims of evolution. Spurious gods more curious than kind.

All her aliens colliding. In a rupture of smoke and sky. The rain unrepentant as she draws on the streets. With broken pencils. Coaxing the pigs. And waiting on the whores. She says it's not worth it. This gracious pandemonium is killing me. And I want it to.

Finally wake up in my bones and say this is only skeleton. Discard the meat and bury it. Defeat the physics. By the ass of the wore.

A cat leaping across world. As if none are real, except the one she's left behind.

Testing the integrity of the machine. Aware. Fully committed to all of its weaknesses.

Counting. The treads. The scuff marks that lead to empty closets. Warm coats with no one in them. Long scarves around her limp neck. The math in her thighs subtracting. From.

Teasing her time machine. As she colors the doors. The years invade. Too content to let us live. Killing her gods to let the demons live. Waiting on the doctor to name the disease. So that she can blame it.

All my victims. Like rose petals on the wind. All my years imagining. How cold it is.

The monkey hates the garden. The threes are against the twos. My life has turned on me. The trees connect Earth and sky, but know nothing of all that's in between.

She asks. Then ask again. The motives of the villain. The color of the ocean. When the moon is gone. The pause takes her farther than the motion. Sickness in obvious steps. The hallways whisper from far away. The rabbit shares its burrow with the hound. Ugly mistakes make for beautiful decisions.

Nothing now.

An empty chessboard. A missing queen. A thousand pawns. Selling their weapons. For a single kiss from bigger monsters.

Everything in perspective. The cold seeps in through thinning walls. Frail fingers molest the things they cannot touch.

Heroes and villains. Pretending to know which they are.

Princes and frogs. Suit their skins to the occasion. It gets cold. Then cold still. Until we can understand the dead. Closets full of coats do nothing to ward off this winter. Fistfuls of salt devour the ice that would remind us of our steps.

The world stops. On the edge of the dime. The seconds we waste waiting for it to fall are infinite.

The monster at her window asks. How long has it been. Years. Maybe more she confesses. These moments. A tampon engorged with menstruation. Its blood seeping into my underwear.

The monsters everywhere. Trying on her dirty dresses. Teething time in fractions. The world in decimals. No multiplication to be found.

Stubborn atoms decide. To find us. Time relenting. As the explosion subsides. We are left with. Remnants. Broken chalk. With which to outline the dead. The beasts with full bellies. Our bones their toothpicks.

Go back he screamed. As I wondered what back could be. Beginning. Middle. End. It was anyone's guess. Back to where I thought. As I contemplated all the lives we'd left.

The quarter on her wrist. Playing heads or tails with if. The island in her head. Talking to the ocean in shouts. Just pretend she warns. That there's no one there. Ignore the pistons. As the motor peters out.

The promise of the vacuum works its ways into the grief. She pretends there are flowers. In the soil she has saved.

The dead things in her gown. Repeating. Evident fairy tales. The dead things. Like heavy rings on her fingers. Making it hard to explain. The numbness. The liars on their high towers. Pissing down on what was almost real.

The funeral. In ardent ripples. Pulls the clown from the ritual. Big feet won't save me now. I see her in her seldom dresses. Imagining the world as it should have been. No dead things. Just crayons. Filling in the thick outlines.

No skin to peel away from this fractured skeleton. Just the meat we assume will feed us. No worries of broken bones. No bandages on open wounds. Just ruffles in her frilly dress. Placing its bets. On dirty windows.

Soft experiments on the hunger. Glorify the villains.

The wet door at her back. Heavy and undecided. The glue under her fingernails contemplating. Which ends to connect. It's only forever she sighs. Not very long at all. When you want something.

Everyday is. The choice between sunburn and stitches. It hurts to move. It hurts just as much to sit still.

The window she keeps open to the cold remarks at her obstinance. It's winter the window says. I should be closed.

I prefer to feel the cold she tells it. It's always there. I hate pretending I don't feel it.

Endless winters lost in the earth. Teach me to keep digging, but not for what I should search. The chill poses its riddles and waits for my guess. I answer its warm someplace. I don't need to be there to know this.

The code comes in numbers and letters and flesh. Divisible by necessity. Operable by trust. Letters and numbers jumble toward a vagrant end. But there is no translation. Other than how it began.

Digging into the white. With tired arms and a heavy back. The ground a distant memory I'm struggling to regain. Just leave me in my blizzards. Let the white decide. How lost I am. How deep I must go to find my way out.

The puddles on her window puzzle after the commotion of melting icicles. The shovel scrapes the ground in echoes of porcupines and skunks.

The characters come together. In an array of decimals. Random snowflakes and heavy rain. Seek the door. Pretending there is a bottom.

The code deciphering her. In obvious patterns.

Polite intrusions measure the profound. Bits of skin like yardsticks. Carry the soil in a concatenation of how far. The virus appeals to her soft spots. The weather descends without regard. And we are blind as we once were. As we have ever been. Looking out of these soiled windows. Praying to these absentee gods. Searching for demons in all the wrong places.

Weighing gods against drugs. On broken scales. Perusing the flesh that chases us. In ruddy scabs. Thick with hard blood. And missing skin. Devout with a time I've not been to, and yet cannot forget.

It's only now. Or it was. When last I checked. It's only combustion. Trapped on the checkerboard of our lusts.

Little dolls cut from paper. With scissors too big for her hands. Numb fingers unfolding the instances. In a series of when. She could remember. Or even begin to suspect. Anything mattered.

The dead trees. The browning sun. Fervent in their eclipse. As the world stumbles.

Searching for and not finding.

Where.

The architecture of her frown. In Obvious equations. Frayed gowns wear her. In bold instances of knotted time lines. She finds the future. Weak and crippled. She chases the future through broken mirrors and snowing clouds.

She catches it. In its trampy heels and dirty thong. A pregnant whore of skin and addiction. Talking at the dead. Answering its own questions. In shrinking words.

It's far away she says. And never has been close. Vultures wait not long. For the bone to release. Useless skin. Teasing the riddle. A plague of emotion. Interrupts her experiment.

It's close. Too close to see.

Still. I know it's there. I can feel it.

Naming monsters. An adjective at a time. Lost. In the when. Chasing the obvious. Unaware of what the obvious is.

Little stone children. All dressed up in their bows. The devil on the precipice. The corpse in its tuxedo. Because nothing changes. We're just flaunting our ignorance. As the pebble ripples across the water. Changing the direction of every fish. Before it finally sinks.

The kingdom. It blatant missives. Numbers fraught with skin. The mathematics of bone. Easing into the void. Where the villains are hidden. The practical in the sin. Devouring us. While we contemplate. Better choices.

Little men on the verge of her surrender. Calculating when. This bubble will forget.

All the empty horses on this lonely merry go round.

Potions in the molecule. Parse their magic through the atoms. She talks to time. In frowns and equations. A tempest of possibilities fighting for her attention amongst a kingdom of lambs.

They have conversations. In words divided. By particle waves and common sex. Trading stories about what could have been. Extraneous matter searching the ether for something to be.

Patterns emerge and quickly deflate. In a pandemonium of eager flesh. She asks if the phenonmeon is the result or the cause. But it's obvious there is no difference. It is. Because of us. We are because of it. A series of windows. Encrusted in ice. debating her breath. In vague partitions of the hierarchy. That is choice.

We choose our winters.

Still we blame it.

When we are cold.

Portions of the whole. On a scale made of when. Counting still made sense. In the fluidity of neurons. Combustion. Gentle explosions. Testing the density. Of flesh.

The mind with its roads. Too many to decipher. Torn maps leading to treasures long ago dug up. Time is a coward. More vanity than substance. Red wagons and soiled dolls drug too far. The earth chasing us in stilted coughs. Choking. Like a weak virus that is still stronger than I am.

The numbers come like a profound religion. Everything is counted.

The wolves in the centrifuge. Calmly howling. While our blood is separated.

Brick walls and bacon. All that's left to save us.