Cactus in a big cup. The hybrid charms of long goodbyes. Evolution. In high heels. Close enough. The smell is sober. The taste is drunk. Evolution in short skirts. Gods without mouths talking to apes without ears.

Evolution. Veins bisected in drug.

People. Comments left on the skin.

Evolution in its diaper. Shitting its pants.

Screaming. Change me.

I'm wet.

Speak to me. I need to learn the language.

Evolution.

Teach me to step on angels. In high heels.

Evolution.

Pockets I never knew were there.

Until the change in them began to rattle.

The sexual pleasure of apes not withstanding. I still think I'm close.

People don't wait. They endeavor to live. With or without us. Closed doors on the shadow of her casket. Love is a morgue. Drawers full of dead. The heart is an autopsy. Once you know you can't save it, all you want to know is why it's gone.

When I was younger I used to tell myself I'd learn the difference. But now I know I never will. Dead is dead. Whatever way you choose to bury it.

In panics of skin she tried to drown herself. Searching for the right ratio of drug to sex. Sure it was poison. Now knowing herself to be immune.

You can't punish lovers by ignoring them. They forget and you are left wishing you hadn't let them. You can't measure the velocity of love by secrets told, but that is how you can prove it.

So many familiar enemies. If only we could know who to kill.

You can play the wolf. Blow all those houses down. But no one's lived there for so long. How does it matter?

Masks. Showing. Faces. Muscle discarding skin. Thick diapers full of our shit. Bright rashes chronicle the neglect. Chambers of god showing.In coughing quotes from dying friends. You want to be alone. So be it.

Masks. Skin is guilty, but has a great attorney. Skin is guiltily, but is rich enough to buy its freedom. Skin like Velveeta. Turning colors that should never be eaten. I take a little more off until you're bored again.

Destroyed. Impotent at every milestone.

An old man wandering the innards of a girl. Soiled diapers. Broken teeth. In jars beside my bed. Masks. In the time travelled between heart and hand.

Let is go. Let us collide with the path. Each footstep promising progress.

Every breath sending us back.

Even the first demon had a teacher. Even the last demon has to admit. We lied well. Even if not enough.

The salt it makes a mask so perfect. I almost want to wear it.

He was speaking in skins. Lifting weights on every breath. Waiting for the rotten fruit to become edible again. Bartenders in some fairy tale of blinking eyes that never happen to see what's staring at them.

Hearing the stop sign, but deciding not to listen.

Life. Like bubble gum breaking between careless lips. Stuck to faces that quickly forget.

Laughing sadly about the many haunted houses we've slept in to get to this one.

The stones seek their language. In bit and pieces. The doctor is overcome by his medicines. Tongues. Like treasure maps. Counting the steps to heaven.

She imagines the cradle in the tree rocking. Full of hope someone has to hate.

Pop!

She continues chewing her gum. She loves the taste of nothing.

Cupid's on heroin saving up the methadone.

I don't know how to pick a peach, but I do know how to eat one. Bite hard. And swift. Let the juices run down your chin staining your clothes in sticky traces of the flesh you've consumed.

Then wear those clothes until everyone you encounter can almost taste what was inside you.

The only difference between sedatives and amphetamines are the people who take them. Same reason. Different methods. Every addiction is born in childhood. Some dark face you can't recognize, but fingers you won't forget. Every savior is doused in blood because how else could we relate to them. Recovery is a failure of sorts. A failure to manage our pain with the treatments we've chosen. A failure to prove the art we've made truly belongs to us.

I don't know how to execute a dream, but I do know how to have one. Go to sleep assuming you'll never wake up.

I don't know how to draw a circle, but I do know they're seldom perfect.

I didn't pick the peach, but I tasted it. Summer. Moons I hadn't seen in ages. Arguments explaining why it's never dark enough to see what's above us.

I don't know what hope there is hidden past the stars, but I do know how to find them.

Turn off the lights.

Stop seeing what isn't there.

Forgetful Stalins searching for their bus pass. In a world where everything is lost. Take us there. As the stars take the universe a little closer to our grasp. Unreal, yet possible to imagine.

Nervous threads hold the blanket to the floor. Waiting for indications from the absentee gods that those flesh stains aren't contagious. Staying naked like this. Without any skin on. Only seems to prove me wrong. It is a choice. It's just a bad one.

The communists had it right. Take everything in sight. Give all you have. You'll have nothing either way.

All I can want pales in comparison to what is gone. Weighing the dogs. Measuring the drugs. Equations of high make deciding optional. dying a formality amongst so many empty skins.

Turn off the stars. Flip the switch on the moon. Tell the nightnmares to be at the
ready.

I remember.

Everything.

How at home you are knowing tomorrow isn't coming. Factor twelve. Pi executes itself in a long, wandering eulogy. Warning us that life has as many decimal places to go.

Extinguished dragons. Legless dogs. Pale like a tv with the captions off. I prefer their voices to come from my head. The actors are useless when the story is your own. And all their stories are mine. Written seconds before they speak. If this is addiction I think I prefer it. Finding myself in the phlegm of rogue sneezes that bespeckle my shirt.

A calm madonna ready to be worshipped, but finding her disciples less than eager. I've plenty of blood to spill. You need only cut me.

Red. Sure. Determined.

To see again.

All that was never there.

No one wonders. At least, I've never seen evidence to the contrary. Had I been willing to bet I would've bet on nothing. No one. But I never bet on anything other than surrender.

The itchy grease paint that turns people into characters. Tiny words on their faces I almost can't read. Dialogue like an antibiotic for missing saviors and sobriety's not yet recovered.

Still mine. Or someone like her. Clairvoyant infections thicken the bridges and narrow the paths. I dream of nooses and overdoses. Because life is secondary to living.

I tell lies because the truth is not a friend to anyone but the richest. How you measure such wealth is entirely subjective.

But I know nothing else if not when I'm lost. And this isn't it.

Or maybe I'm so lost that I just like to pretend that I can't be found.

No matter. Over is close enough to where I started searching.

Let me go.

I need to fall.

Sad now because sleep was gone. The iron rabbit foiled by the paper tortoise. She woke up the ant and told it to begin foraging again. As if food were scarce. Because it was. Always hard to come by lasting meals. Genuine salvation.

God wasn't looking as she tore off a piece of paper from the tablet. God wasn't interested that the ink her pen had run dry. Calculations came in failing concrete. In dead birds of prey. Everything was small except for the numbers. The heels she wore to make herself tall.

Little girls in grandma's closet draped in lies she must've worn. Wondering how long until they'll fit.

All gods lie.. Once we learn this what is there left to worship?

The bed didn't care whether she slept in it or not. It stood there empty either way. All her sleep hostage consciousness. All her rest found in quiet tornadoes. Picking at the dead leaves with fingers made of glass. Too many reflections to decide which one is accurate. Climbing the barren tree trunks in chokes of touch. Too many corpses to know from where the ghosts originate.

Trying on her last few pairs of eyes she looks at what she knows isn't there. Trying to imagine what something so unreal could ever look like. If she were the girl she was then. Who would be the woman she is now? Would it matter if she never were.

Chasing the cold with missing skin. Lost in the irony of her predicament. Each minute like chewing gum. A taste only. No nourishment. So many impostors tell her who she was. But none of them know who she is.

She lies to herself. Lies to everyone. Says she doesn't remember how it feels.

Riding the carousel she thought the horses had the advantage. Moving so many without having taken a single step.

It always took days for her clothes to fit and by then she had to take them off. It's no fun being dirty all by yourself. It's no good being dirty if there's no one who wants to lick up the mess.

She made an omelet for herself. Out of all the foods the refrigerator had left in it. It tasted like the last time she remembered having been touched. Empty, but her still wanting more of the nothing.

She took a sharp knife and dew her pictures in the onion. A teary coloring book foul with pictures undone. She sealed the envelope and almost put the stamp on it. Letters to no one. Carousels still spinning. Long after the horses are dead.

It was easy to be her she thought as her skin fell to the floor.

I was always just pretending that I wasn't alone.

Sweet sausage tongues conspiring in the vagaries of dismissal. The foolish kittens with loud claw scratch out the exclamation point. She tells the teddy bear to be patient. She'll sew its eyes back on some day. But until then. Try to see without them. Scolding the mountain with chastity belts for which I've long since lost the key.

Strange how we ask those questions like attack dogs. Content with killing what we want and cannot have. New leashes. To choke me. New fences to dig under. Give us splinters for someone else to extract. As if it would matter if I could toss that coin again. Make a new wish.

Pretending I've never asked for anything before. Or been in the position of denying someone happiness.

Blindfold this darkness and sew that smile onto the face of the doll. in maps made of skin. we were never lost. it's not our fault that it's taken life all this time to find us.

it's not our fault the drugs don't listen when we tell them we found ourselves again.

Beautiful irony.

Ironic beauty.

The darkness calculating the sun. In the dense bones of flightless angels.

I never saw it until I stopped looking.

Guilty with the dead spider on the bottom of her shoe. A run in her mood unstoppable. Where's the giant hand to flatten her she asked to the song she wasn't listening to anymore. Same ugly music she always assumes belongs to her. Like pleasure belongs to rich, dirty old men. And hopelessness only to the desperately young.

Where's the exit to the maze the walls asked in a snit of left over woman syrup. Changing herself she thought of babies and geriatrics. How prevalent the diaper is in all stages of a female life. How soiled her underwear was from the night before. The dead roses that swell in and then pour from her gut until it's empty for another little while. The garden under her skin. Below her bones. Manic with reasons she wants no part of. Foul with the sweat of a happiness she imagines other people must find in all the things she tries not to want.

She likes to sleep for as long as she can. She tries her hardest to never wake up again. But her body always betrays her. Still much healthier than she has done to it. Still much younger than she remembers of having lived in it.

They'll say you're not special. And you probably aren't. They'll say that skirt would look better a little higher. And maybe it would, but it's not for them to decide. She'll wear the time like a bracelet. Too loose around her wrist. It'll fall off. She'll be glad when it does.

That it's gone. And she doesn't have to wear those high heel anymore. Make so many apologies she doesn't mean. Or ever wear again those dresses they've picked out for her.

Throwing away the dimes that the dollars left her. The dirt wants to say she's short-sighted, but it's heavy from so much rain. She shrugs it on like she tends to all that mud. Thin skeletons dance on her skin. Tangoes. Paso Dobles. And people. Like earnest beauty pageants. Pretend they can dance on their crutches.

On top of her sheets. A Disney cast between her thighs. Dialogue vomits from idle skin. Chunks of hours before coming up completely undigested.

Some would say she's shy. Most would. And they'd be correct. Every word she speaks is a debate. Every touch is a promise. Not to make too much of something so little.

She likes to think it's them, but she knows it's her.

On top of the sheets. Choosing at random princes and witches. Talking to the mirror. Wondering why it doesn't answer.

The ponytails on her backside wagging as she flaunts her infection. With a broad admiration for how she came to be this sick. She likes to say it's about recovery, but she knows it's about the sickness. All the men she can cut from this one if she folds him correctly.

She was never good with scissors, but this is easy.

The meat is cooked, but the skin is still raw.

Humiliated by the feast the wolf retreats. Amber paw prints slice through the glass between starvation and pride. Beads of moonlight like scurrying ants steal for themselves what we were too proud to eat.

We think we still have the cotillion. The belaboured gowns wasted on one night of thoughtless favor. Giving what can't be given back. Reaping girls into women with blunt machetes. Finding their future in fallen fruit.

Riding the frogs in stiff stirrups. Her hips artichokes. Waiting to be peeled. Her breasts homemade meatloaves. Naked without their mashed potatoes.

Her Ass in the clouds. Her head in their crotches.

Ready to swallow.

All fairy tales preempted. All pieces of glass stubbornly hanging onto the window.

More lard on the inferno. To caramelize the myopia. More mints on the pillow. To show how blind I am.

Taking her frailties like insulin injections. Stifling the disease to make it come back that much stronger. Eager as a tortoise. Blase as a hare. In fables she'd ostracized long ago. Critiques of weakness manufactured by a Zen of Camelots. She's as strong as she needs to be to pretend the truth is a metaphor. There's an Aesop in every orgasm. She thinks as she imagines what clothes they take off for other women.

There are so many lives she's almost lived. Like scenes cut from a movie. Scripts rewritten for happier endings. It's pastures frying under the slope of the sun. Too confident in our dependence.

Soft battles in hard wars. Big answers in little bottles.

She doesn't remember what they wore.

I'm talking to them. Just not in ways they can't hear. Jesus pudding is chocolate. Satan is vanilla. Love is neopolitan. Both of them and something else.

The end is caramel. Burnt sugar. Sweeter than it's ever been. I'm only condoning suicide if it's the best the solution. Like in most cases. Most people. Bipolar clown faces drawn over the actual ones.

The exaggerated outlines I call lovers turning my fear into art. A palette knife always under her tongue. Ready to caox the mountains from the flood. The canvas between her legs still as blank as the first time she opened them.

Perdition only makes sense when you believe in redemption. Otherwise it's just masturbating until it hurts.

I'm not a clown, but I know how to wear the makeup. I'm not god, but I know what he's thinking.

Perfect sleep that lasts for days. This body is an archive. This mind a graveyard. The dead what we live for.

Children in wet pajamas in beds made of clay. Chewing the feet off their barbie dolls. Because. Because her toes are always pointed. Because her boyfriend has no penis and her car never runs out of gas.

Cutting onions. As fast I can. The circus acrobatics of boredom. Empty clown shoes everywhere. I told them all to go away. I stole and built a dungeon from all their red foam noses. So that they wouldn't come back.

I only left behind the shoes. Plastic drugs at the heel of every step. White faces poached by painted grins. The amber of their long eyelashes turning the moon into a prison. Some soft rehab of salt and vinegar like how life tasted before I couldn't keep it down.

I'm sick. But I'm not stupid.

You say what you're thinking in bits of dodgeball. Hit or be hit. Lapses of reason hardly momentary. The turbulent quack of empty rooms as they tumble in on the eyes watching them. Toddlers in soft shoes still fumbling with the prospect of freedom. Utterly unaware of how virulently dependence will seek its revenge.

Little fairy tales tick off the dosages we've used. Huffing on the dick of the cure. Disease is. Sickness is. Pretending we could ever be those people we were. Addiction is. Hopelessness is the whore of happiness. The heroin in each touch as our humility soils the bed.

I'm not ready to be vulnerable. Nor have I ever been. Choices are seldom what we make of them.

But none of that is the problem.

It's the gap. The hot, sour asphalt from now to whenever. This silent alarm never warns anyone.. There's just a lot of screaming no one can hear.

Sex like dodgeball. And penises like stitches falling out.

Big hills in small steps. Short walks over a long distance. Like drunk sex. Needing to be naked. From the inside out. Born into oblivion. One stranger at a time. Falsely casual sex. A perfect dissection of each motive of every hole the female body compulsively flaunts. Bright, little thunderstorms erupt from quiet skin. She wants to be penetrated. Sex. The incessant sting of angry yellow jackets.

Stabbing until numbness arrives. Leaving no barbs inside her. As she'd always hoped they would. No souvenirs at all, except the dead skin that fills those empty spaces.

Just the tantrums of lonely men gnawing on her nipples until blood became milk. Just flaccid penises stabbing at their dead mothers until all women were as useless.

Machine guns of flesh trying to make every hole in her bigger. Resentful because there are more than they can fill.

She had made her wish.

A penny seemed expensive.