Hearing only half of everything that was said made her consider that everything is not always there. It must be noticed. Nothing can be proven. Our reality is merely the humble malfunctions of infinitely intersecting perceptions. Even so. It is all we have. All that we are.

A nightmare preserved in the sweat stains on a girl's pillow. Waking up is only a contradiciton. Hope spoiling quietly in the hardening crust on discarded latex. Touch is only a means to an end I don't want. The child is incredulous. The woman is deaf.

She sleeps. She dreams. Both light and dark. She sleeps. She wakes. There is no world. Only the difference. Between now and then. Everything is loud. Everything is quiet.

She counts backwards from zero. Assuming she will find the beginning. And finally understand which lies are worth telling.

The dust on the letters filling the air as she tries to determine. What it is she knows. And what she only thinks she does.

It's always cruel to tell the truth. There are no exceptions.

The cellar. Cautious toes tempt the steps down. The pull. Loose dresses betray her hips. In little grins pungent with the pageants of lazy gods. The earth. Like a grave. The whisper of touch. Laces tied by nervous fingers. The coax of footprints. The patience of the sand.

The child. The seduction. Every breath is helium. The air too heavy. Time too arrogant. To suspect we could manipulate what it does to us.

I find the beginning. Drag the end to it. I steal the sound of his failing attempts to own her. I listen. And am deafened by the silence.

The cellar. The grim. of cooking witches in candy houses. The woods. The sanctuary. Of victims. As they please the fire.

The accurate. The seldom. The man with his back to the window. The world close enough to grab.

Long movies at the back of her throat. Silent ones. In black and white. The dialogue of demons unheard. Yet obvious. Waking up is the hardest part of falling asleep. Closing her eyes. Hoping they won't ever open. Resting the bottle beside her words. Wondering. If anyone has heard. The sound. Of letting go.

The aliens under her skin. Searching for a logic. The time machine in her fingertips hustling to take her back. Or forward. It's hard to tell. She doesn't know. If it's the future or the past. It all looks the same. How do I tell where I am. When everywhere I go looks the same?

It's just time she assures herself. The liar in my birthday candles. Assuring me I am old. It's just time. Convincing me I can't remember the things I'll never forget.

Kittens glued to the carpet by claws they can't control. Stories I see no reason to tell. Skin. Velcro ripping away. The future ripe enough to to swallow.

Not a thing. Knots in things. Crusty bandanges of skin. Flaking off. The butterfly in his fingers finding the wings this worm never did. Not in side. Knotted insides. The obvious hangmen.

I was silly to think of you. Or of anyone in that way. I lose sometimes to the child in me. I lose myself sometimes in the illusion of flight. Or rather that a pair of wings would be sufficient to grant me dominion over gravity. I was young. Am still sometimes. When I drink too much and listen to little.

Sex some would say is just a hole. And its plug. I guess it is. For most of us. Just pretending to love what doesn't love us. The treason of flesh pervasive. As I indulge the concept of men. Dicks too obvious. How could I ever had been tricked into thinkiing that I was close enough.

Building snowmen out of what's left of the frost. They make me warm and everything is gone. Every thing is. Stalled gods on their flimsy heavens. Waiting for constipated lions to fart.

I open my eyes again and there's nothing I haven't seen.

Nothing I have.

Nothing at all. Except the the way I remember being loved. Or at least the moments I wasted thinking that I was.

Someone else.

I throw my pebbles at the icicles. They remain. As sharp as ever. I guard the king a little too much.

And lose again.

Passage was close to time travel. The green dress on her young bones made that quite apparent. The world was closer than it had ever been. Little ants building castles in her panties. Passage had so many meanings. She couldn't decide which one fit.

Maybe then. Pale thighs in short skirts made of fists. Scabs explaining themselves to the infection.

Maybe now. The pus like a river. Limbs working. Time the one enemy we've always had in common. Even before it mattered.

The poison was always there. Only now we've found it. She remembers herself at last. Knowing it's too late.

Not to forget again.

Maybe then. When her pussy was still thorny with the poke of strangers. And now was only one of many candles not blown out on a very stale birthday cake.

She finds herself, but doesn't know if the search is over.

The atmosphere expecting. Words. Or some kind of language. Flaps of skin like a broken screen door. Banging. Opening loudly. Closing louder yet. Time. Empty condom afterward. Playing the teacher to dead students.

Antonyms. The prevailing scent of when. Gravity felt weaker.

Coaxed by moments. Hours renting their tuxedos. Clean bones slipping into their new clothes. Worn by as much as wearing. The black and white. The brittle obstacles meant to make us love each other.

Sex. Molecules not convinced this is where they belong. Sex. A compendium of all the dares I traded for truths.

It's always over. It's always finished. A chorus of fingers manipulate tender jests. Alive once. Black hole admits. Life is only what it can suck out of others.

She was foul. Her entire body busily surfeited by too many tugs on her vagina. The politics of touch excavating. Forgotten graves. Exhuming the balding bones. Further evidence. That truth is multiple choice. Pointed. And curved. Like candy canes. The colors running on a bias. Where all the sweet things go to obsess. Over the process of changing.

Becoming sour.

A fountain of semen spitting out and swallowing ceaselessly. With the calm panic of one who knows how fickle love must be. To leave us with the decisions that it does.

My demons. In their best heels. Trying on dresses they can never afford. My demons. Like swatches of skin too delicious to discard.

Even after the meat has gone rotten. and the bread is stale.

It tastes better then. If you chew slowly.

Little lies on a simmer. Finally coming to a boil.

Still cold. Still scratching their names into empty folds of skin. Left over after she's undressed.

Close enough some would say. Close enough to wrong to be right. Or at least have some hope of finding it.

Choice is a victim. We are the consequence,

Skin like cataracts. There is only the intention of touch. We see by sound. The sound. Lips dividing like Velcro ripping apart. The scream of defeated friction. All we have left is gravity. The physics of falling.

We flirt with time. Teasing the quantum. Charming what cannot be charmed. The science of seduction lies in our misinterpretations of one another. In our willingness to ignore the facts.

I can go back. As often as I wish. Time is an external force. But there's no one there. A million moments splitting into billions of quarks. Microscopic dances of flesh drowning inside a fingertip.

We're too big. To fit inside each other.

Rogue time machines on the whims of sex. Proportioning starvation.

We're too small. Caterpillars. Cocoons not lasting. The exit only makes the hole larger.

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.

Coils. Detonating. The fingers of oblivion. Counting couches. Not yet sat upon. The sneeze of serendipity. A brief blowjob. By comparison. I wasn't there, but I heard about it. The end of everything. In a whimper. Drool on numb lips. Shadows of men cancelling out the moon.

Almost as if we were there once. And are choking on trying to remember.

Dying. Weak fireworks pause the skin. The world watches the liars the closest. The moment listens for what we'll never say. The journey engulfs the traveler. Now that there is no place left to go.

I could fool the bone. Convince it to heal. But why would I? When these splintere suit us so much better.

I want a different god. One who isn't so obvous.

I want that paisley skin back. It's mine. No matter who steals it. I want back that world. Where over is just the beginning.

He never said much. Words always prove vindictive. Copernicus grin. Littered with big teeth. Metaphors on the verge of knowing their muses. Pants on the floor. In steady geometrics of skin. The circumference of alone calculating the density of this decision. To forget. Decide it doesn't matter what I want. Or feel I should have.

I'm only one plague at the onset of an epidemic. People. In chalkboard houses quietly erasing the cure. It was never there, they'll claim. Swimming in the quicksand. The smothering is candy. Sweet fruit hitting me in the head. As the trees decide to go naked.

Time is both a practical device and an emotional one. To gauge the affection of absentee skin. To determine the distance between this lover and the next. Time is an empty drawer in the morgue. Waiting for dead things to fill it.

People in colors like melting crayons. The pengunent smell of marker as the outline draws its course. Everything tells me what it wants.

Not sayThe s what it can give.

To unread books ripped from their covers, to liars lost in the truth.

The slope. The tender anecdote between words and sweat. Time in fables called memory. The truth becomes us. In feeble thrusts. The cough. Tin lungs. Alone exploding in bits of touch. Lips of Lycra cling hard to the shape of us.

and just as easily forget.

Down. The empty anthill in the rain. All turning to mud. The scout. Bringing fairy tales back to the colony. Buzzing briefly with bigger and better gods.

Then. Tournaments of skin running through us in broken marathons. Pretending we could ever go that far.

Now. Cheating the darkness in little jumps. Of rope not tied. To anyone. Losses. Quick. As the world is. To prove us wrong.

Or try.

Turn over your tulips. Address the roots. Bold fingers stab at the stillness with sharp fingernails. Seeds huddled under the dirt imagine what the sun is. As children must imagine god. Big yellow suns for eyes amused by our long, messy births.

The blood is a measure. Distracted scale weighs the shadows in the picture. Petrified ghosts rejoice as the frame is shattered. She only requires the negatives.

Constructing lifetimes out of Popsicle sticks. No glue. Just the residue to sure the structure.

I'm only familiar with flowers in the fact that they exist. Don't send me any unless you wish them dead.

I was toying with the concept of starvation. Tasting the last breath . Rolling it around on my tongue like some expensive chardonnay. The sour of decision evident. In so many careless strokes.

Bored with the easy lie she moved onto more complicated variations of the same truth.

Here is your cake.

Just don't eat it.

There is god enough for me in the folds of skin that separate penis and vagina. Too much really. Angels in their broken songs pretend to know failing people. Rubbing their white wings with the bloody rags of broken bones. Silly sacks of skin pedalling too fast on treacherous highways. Red, red lips no one has licked for so long. Darwin laughs from his grave as I attempt a funeral for what he referred to as evolution.

No one was there when I noticed the truth accepting bribes. I had no camera the first time that I saw life bargaining with death. I didn't have a pencil when I saw god for the first time. Big fat liar that he is. A bunch of men playing behind curtains at consoles to complicated. A wolf trying to disguise its fangs.

Severed arms. Red capes. Empty picnic baskets.

Salvation enough.

For the colorblind.

The hen took off its beak. Curious she thought, that it remained so red removed from the face. The color she reasoned came from blood and cells. Molecules fermenting in a stew of bacteria. As all living things are.

With purpose she cataloged the derelict expressions his face dared to churn forth. In minutes mediocre. In abridged equations of the theory of man. Lying never suited him unless it suited his agenda. The truth was whatever he had decided of it.

Take your clothes off she pleaded. Violently urgent to know. What of him she could still touch amongst all the moments she'd imagined. It was real, he begged. As real as you wanted of it. The geese were shot. The dogs retrieved their carcasses. We cooked the meat. We chewed it.

How it tasted was your decision.

Don't take your face off just yet. You've barely grown into it he said. Thoughtlessly. Measuring the distance between skin and bone as he would ingredients for any stew. Leftovers. A poor man's feast. Ice cream sundaes in a power outage. Taste me now or I become your poison.

She was wearing a nightgown she knew had been worn before. By several women previous. Laying in the same bed. Next to the same stranger. Gurgles of an uneventful paradox broiling in her uterus. What happens. What has. Tolling in her chest. Marking each hour as it happens. As it always had happened. Be she in her own time or theirs.

See how this one fits, he offered. Uninterested. The scars make your frown less intrusive. The rabbits won't fuck anymore. And you're partially the reason. Nothing is ever born in this world without a pretense. Without facades. Ones that fit better than yours does right now.

And now, after all, is all we have left. We left the future behind. We've forgotten the past. Now is all that's left to determine if we'll ever be again.

The dogs were sleeping quietly on the back porch. The moonlight grooming what was left of their barks. Warnings to strangers to keep their distance. At least, the obvious ones.

By the time she'd gotten back to herself it was too late. She already knew, but was still determined to go there.

Words enough. Wouldn't you say? Choices. Dying lightning bugs in my jar. I can see it the dark if I have to. Or I can be blind if that is what I want.

The trigger in the seat of her pants. Longing to be squeezed. The bullets in the bend of her thighs. Hoping to penetrate.

Time with its hot cattle prod pushes the hours forward. There are no cowboys anymore. To coral the strays. Nothing to spur the steeds to run. No needles to fat with sacrifice to mend this fraying skin.

The tabloid of touch is all we have now. While I stare up at stars I can no longer name.

The lie has a certain grace when at last you realize the lie is all you have. Stale Saturn's tease the moon. The moon bullies the stars. Until all these clothes are useless. The kaleidoscope of touch bends. Breaks what we were. Into pieces small enough to swallow.

The disease makes us better. If we can allow it.

The irony of flightless birds finally makes sense.

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.

At this angle the moon seems more a measure than a mark. For how distant everything is. Wax fingers perpetuate the flood of not forgetting where I have been. Desire like dominoes. One tumbling down causing all the others to fall. It was never fate. Just lonely people committed to their prisons.

The fork in the story comes not from the author. The characters are to blame. Interrupted epiphanies turn down the collars on heavy beds. The fluorescent lights make all the white sheets blue. So I can see the empty where there is everything.

The hours measuring themselves in years. Futures. A paradox of conditions not met. I'm here. And there. I'm everywhere I've ever been. Stealing paths not taken.

Drawing ears on deaf pillows.

She thinks in sounds. She sees in touch. Losing her virginity every night to nightmares she can't remember. Purple skin whispers of stories she may have read. A long time ago. Missing underwear hides between the pillows waiting to be discovered. She sleeps in dogs. Feral curs afraid to growl at because all their fangs have fallen out. Nothing, but the meat left to covet. No desire to feed the hunger.

It always comes back. Deeper than it left.

Same movie different actors. Same con. Different victims.

The sheets discuss her when she's not listening. Some pale infant not quite ejaculated from her mother's womb. Half born by. Half smothered. In so much potential.

With a Trojan smile and wooden skin she waited silently for the ambush in her head to win.