Yesterday still on her list of clothes to wear. Before she gets old. The matador. The sad songs. With heavy horns. The red cape between her thighs. Doses of anger. Sneaking into the cures.

The brainwash comes in stilted intervals. I'm free because they say I am. I'm happy because that is what we are.

The cardboard of her lips not retaining the words I'd written upon dirty cheeks. The smother of the first touch. The starvation of the last. We died with pride in humble graves. We lived knowing it was purposeless. Heaven not reason enough. Hell no deterrent. Calling our demons by name. Christening them by the faults of our bones. The devil does not frighten me. Since I know he is confined to the prison of my skin.

The pus. Thrones of dead gods. Stuck to filthy crowns. forcing me to change my bandages.

The infection omniscient. All my diseases are gods. All my angels lie about how close I am to heaven.

She was standing on snow. In front of it and behind. Her ass spread on the warm hood of her tercel. The rest of her waiting for something to happen.

The world is a coin toss. Sex is a lottery. Winning isn't the object. It's all about believing that someday you might. He placed a brown paper bag beside the snow mound under her feet. Wine, beer and snacks. The romance of a drunk man. The valentine of a perpetual bachelor.

The room was large, but had never known empty. She was barely old enough not to hate herself anymore. Maybe he knew that, but she didn't think he was that clever.

The beer was bitter. The lubricant was icy. As she dug for his motive. The words were there. In fragments of what she had meant to say. Sedate gods on the edge of failing heavens. The flush of missing skin tempting. Loose bandages on nervous wounds.

He was ready a long time ago. She still wasn't. The echo of skin repeating loudly as she tried to explain to herself what was happening.

The alarm going off so loud that she had to assume she'd already woken up.

The door was open as he took his piss. Like she hadn't been there at all.

Banana peels in the dresser. All her skin trying to regain its balance. Debating whether gravity actually exists.

Porcupine she said. Born of needles. Her open thighs lilac like the night is when no one is looking. Minor plagues these bits of time we call moments. An epidemic when you add them all up.

Octopus. I have too many arms to feel anything. It's all just grabbing. Holding onto nothings with absent hands. Eulogies in pencil. The dead erasing all the adjectives. I couldn't know her even if I could count that high. Which I can't. She's scalene. The vertical struggles against itself until gravity finally wins.

Small aliens unnoticed in the pockets of fat the fill the darkness. Voices. Eyes. Limbs. Skin like a siren. Eyes like an ambulance. We're always saving the dying.

The living don't stand a chance.

Little aliens. Freckles of hate on her cheeks. They failed me. And I them. In all the ways humanity is supposed to save us. I drank so much that Star Trek finally made sense. In that weird way when you can overlook the paradox. Of being in a time where you've yet to exist.

He told me I was good, but could be better. To which I replied not at all. He couldn't save me. Nor I him. And what did we need saving for? All the monsters being in our heads. Or otherwise wishing they could go back there. Like the good little hells they are. Seeking the sins. Not the sinners.

There is so much to say. So much nothing.

It's easy to believe some one's listening.

Or moreso that they will remember.

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.

Doorbells and cyanide. In that order. No one's home. No one has been for so long. Laughing too confident. Fatted martyrs feast on each other. Chapped lips arguing with the mirror. As if it actually sees their their thirst.

Cold sheep bleating in a dark barnyard.. Hoping to be naked again soon.

Piss and peppermint. All he could swallow. Or spit up. As the case demanded. I couldn't find a lie. Only the suspicion. Filthy flags groping at a democracy that will forever remain a virgin.

Change always comes too late. After we don't need it. A future begging us to let it happen.

But the choice. That is what I miss most about having decided.

No diabetic sex to blame for the coma. No cells to accuse of treason. Sex turns its parlor tricks for the wide eyed, but we are not misled.

Never sleep. Never dream. Never wake up.

Indebted only to small lies told in moments of surrender. Small lies that keep getting bigger.

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.

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.

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.

An urgent piss languishes at the back of her throat. The riddle still a riddle. The answer still a risk she's not willing to take. The inches between villains and lovers somehow immeasurable now that I'm one or the other. Maybe both.

His eyes flutter like the wings of a starving moth. Trapped inside this world within the world. Where living is only speculation.

We'll say it's been too long. And we might be right. We'll say it's too dark out there. We'd never find each other anyway.

A rubber band becomes her throat. In scowls of skin thick that pretend they still breathe. The fuse of pantyhose duly lit. Bombs fitted to her crotch. In deliberate surrenders.

In slow stages of brittle it lets go. Rotten fingertips of touch fall apart trying to hold. Stalwart manias confuse love and circumstance.

Tell me I am alone and I will believe you, but still lie to you and say that I don't. Because there's still time. There's still sex enough. To find the woman in all this child.

Words pretend. And so do people. That we can begin again.

Stale dogma of touch all that there is left to worship. The germ between her look and her word. Bits of cancer looking for a host. Finding only victims. They die too quickly. My disease gets so bored.

The skin I've chartered for this trip. Glossy lollipops uncomfortable in their cellophane dresses. Stranded in that last square of hopscotch for want of a stone to throw. For lack of another foot to land on.

It's not hopeless. Just hard to imagine ever wanting to feel that way again. Caught in a hole in the nest. The tip of the condom tormenting a ripe egg.

It's not paper, but it feels that same. Trying to decide how much longer to wait.

The soft collars that we are left to wear. So much heavier than they were when.

The frivolity of men in all phases of sex. No longer astonishes. But it's still loud enough to hear without every having to listen.

Between the bar and sleep there is the catapult of drug that teaches me. When to listen and when to write. In a tornado of tuxedos and gowns. Loud conversations laced with alcohol and wealth. When each drink costs at least an hour I learn to write faster. Stealing the moment from under their toasts. Quietly. At one end of the bar I wait for the music to retire. I watch as they petition the gods with cocktails and aftershave.

I couldn't say that anything happened there all that different from what ever has. I couldn't say they were really any different than me other than in appearance. But maybe that is what matters after all.

There's a reason all bars are dark. You don't want a good look at those faces. And you don't want anyone to see yours.

The further away I get the more I realize I've not gone anywhere.

They watch me as much as I watch them. A stalemate between curiosity and judgement. We sleep while the ocean moves us forward. We wake up. And cheat our way back to where we began. Wherever we've gone. Wherever we are.

It's the same.

It's the distance between picking the place and going there that always gets in the way. Open bottles sifting through the debris of various moments. At soft angles. Gentle enough so that I can't smell. Decision disappearing into alcohol. Choices made long ago. Threaded through my skin in sloppy stitches. Holding together holes that still haven't closed.

The hour in its denim. Thick with daredevils. Speeding up as I approach the gap between their words and their actions. Intentions flying like darts at a bar. Tiny torpedoes launched by humbled hands. Cold contests of submission decide whom we'll want.

Shy bulls eyes get lost in thick walls. In a nest of choices. Empty since. Friendship took over this skin. The passive restraints alcohol and email. Little gods with big heads. Making the letters hard. Making the words a villain.

But it only takes another drink to find them. Lost balloon floating away toward the sun. As light as it was. I still lost my grip. As far away as it floats. I can still see it. All the clouds are too ready to shift. To let me watch it disappear.

They found a void in our universe. A giant void. And now I'm always asking myself if I am it.

Only half a bottle left. But more than that to tell. The paradox of the poet. Of the addict. Of the person left to launder on the rope in their tug of war. Stiff skin. Bellows against the breeze. Lingers over the mud in the middle. Of a pulling contest only alone ever wins.

No paragraph short enough to dissuade this scavenger from picking at what's left of the carcass. It's already dead. And my shame dissolved. In fractions of skin. Melting soft on the bills of the vultures. I can't blame anyone. I can't learn from what I've done wrong. Because I'm wrong even if I start again. I'm lost even if I find myself. Because it's all middle. And I'm there in it. Not knowing what to touch.

Sanctuary can only lead two places. Happiness or hopelessness. Depending on where you've come from.

Counting the fat on my shins. Spaces between each bone. Until I reach my middle. And then I know. How to draw the map. Between myself and them. And then their lies have character. If you can count that high.

With hands made of riddles. Tepid dramas debate us. In the filthy rhetoric we wear as faces. In the musty burlap we call skin. Culling the wine from sour grapes. And beds made of words never said. Vampires in the keyboard lapping at sex spilled. Politicians in the text. Making all these masks meaningless.

I remember the first. Frail. Useless muse. Words approaching. Blurred and still in makeup. Staging the pieces in little losses. Framing the surrender in fireworks.

The second. Overconfident. Bitter candies in a beautiful box. The luster of ribbons knotted across the seams of the heart. Shaky letters in cursive still too young. To finish sentences greater than my obsession.

Looking out in shy resolves. A gentle warfare with the self. Like sleep only louder. I'm better. I'm worse. I'm everything I want to be.

And nothing.

The third. Musty curtains begin to part. Revealing a stage where a dialogue is being born. Cigarettes burn to quickly. Clothes fall off. Wrinkled fetuses elope with the world. In hemorrhages of sobriety.

Looking back in thinning gloves. A fingertip to the clock. Every second an upper cut. Every lover a boxing matching. If only I could be young again. I'd know better than to love anyone. If only I could go back. I'd know better than to wear bras so tightly.

The fourth. The epiphany in blurry scores. Some refrain of music I can't recognize. The last. The god in a mortals smile. Fouled by such red teeth.

The instruments of our distaster all around me. And still I can't hear the music I know is there.

The pretty in the addiction. The deity impersonating the man. One drink at a time. In the rquake of small step ladders. That make small men tall.

Everything si not enough. Everything isn't even close to what I want.

The heavy halos of certain angels more than I can lift. The panic of happiness overdosing right there on my doorstep.

I'm content enough just to have the love of the colors on the walls. Maple syrup kisses of the dusk. Caramel apple lips of the dawn. In scant bikinis of alcohol knotting off its top. After a long bake in the cinema of sex.

That last taste curdling before it ever reaches my tongue. Swallowing the empty candy wrapper as therapy. In crinkles of cellophane. In a sweet, sweet downpour of the crumbs they forgot to consume. The situation with its shirt unbuttoned. With its condom in its pocket. Already used.

Walls staggering with the threat of us. Partitions of skin deciding our hearts. In a euphoric delirium of semen and sweat. The sheets like carbon. Saving copies of our every kiss. For me to investigate later.

They're just men after all. Rigid ghosts masquerading as flesh. Little doses of drug impersonating love. Faulty scales claiming to know the measure of a woman. Thieves with gift-wrapped fists. Santa Clauses with empty sacks.

The walls on all their faces the same.

No color.

The doors still locked.

No entry. No escape.

Just mannequins receiving his dick. In bitter chokes a clarity. In negatives of a future I can only see when I'm this high.

Graves drawn in pencil.

When I finally decided I had been used enough. It was more surrender than victory. More nysteria than logic. Convincing the wallls to look away as I undressed.

Naked for the first time. Naked forever. The suitable strategies of love still fresh in my mind as I left him.

The only thing real, what was gone.

The architect on steroids. Confessions of a liar. The copyright of skin. Leaving us with nothing to say to each other. Little dolls with frozen elbows trying to wave goodbye to wolves.

I don't drink. I just try to remember. That seldom pinnochio. With strings made of skin. I don't say it out loud, but I always think it. That addiction is just a euphemism for hate. Just one more piece of shit left in the outhouse we sometimes say is love.

The worse the smell the more I am inclined to investigate. The source. The fouler that it gets. The more certain I am that we are closer to to heaven.

We're all in the same shit parade. But only a very few of us enjoy the smell.

I've never written a song.

Never heard the phone ring so loud as it did then. In little bits of hysteria. And I could be myself again. In the fascism of alcohol. In the communism of poetry. I could still find freedom. As much as anyone would want. As little as any heart would wish.

I've never been that young. To kneel down and assemble their faces. Like breaking pastels over the page. A hurricane of colors asking permission from of the emptiness. Young in the way all victims are. With spoiled neckties and borrowed tuxedos. Young in contrast to what I can still recall.

I've never sung a song. But I've heard thousands. Little mosquito bites on my brain coaxing the blood to the surface. In cryptic maps. Of names kept. Secret invitations into their desperation. In complexions of destination paler than I'd imagined.

I can't sing. I can't even cry. To proposition hope for another chance. I can only watch. The ghosts as they assemble. The sanity of surrender as it confesses what I've always known about myself.

I'm determined to die. I'm not willing to try them on again. Wear those liars as I would saviors. Argue with those coffins until dying was the reward.

A spider crawled behind the molding. A yellow light stopped my car. My mood swimming between pink floyd and mudvayne. We watched as they engineered love for profit. And considered how science had failed us.

We sat outside as the sun finally boasted through the clouds. I imagined a smaller world. Where the moments belong to us. Where sex is not an obscenity. And love is not a flaw.

Taking into consideration all facets of my downfall I decided I had not lost. That no one had won. I was just more aware of my defeat. I just didn't want to try anymore.

Writers... poets... they talk to themselves quietly. So no one else should hear. Until they're sure they've said what's most flattering of their frailties.

I lay down each night perfectly sedated. I tell these stories because all the real ones are gone. There is life in fiction. There is salvation in addiction if you look hard.

And that's where I am. Sober enough to know I'm losing. Drunk enough to let it happen.

He made funny faces and we laughed. He made sad ones and we cried. Very much like puppets are the voice of the people behind them.

I like my music loud. My sex louder still. Anger never lies. Not like love does. Anger tells the truth when touch pretends it knows what we want. Cut grass. Bad movies. All the trappings of lonely people. They seem so frivilous now. Phantoms of chalk haunting the blackboard long after class is done. And teacher is gone. The smudge of lessons still under thier fingernails as the students quickly forget. Whatever it was they had almost learned.

He massaged his knee counterclockwise to my approach. A caricature both victim and hero. As is every man in the presence of a new woman. Telling stories. True fairy tales. Of wolves in the woods waiting for their picnic baskets. Of encounters with big teeth.

I take my metaphors one dose at a time. The callous antibiotics time prescribes to the fevered. The empassioned. The minor moments that oce were so grand.