Caution is the traitor. She works her breasts. As any woman would. Like steam engines barreling through barren landscapes. No stopping. No waiting for passengers. Just the scenery. Distant mountains of dick. Dimpled with unripe cum. Bad men on their best behavior. Rogue time machines coax a smile from bitter lips. The hacksaw in the growing folds of his skin. Begins to cut. It goes away. And comes back again. So abruptly. Missing pieces do the math. The remaining ones build the apparatus.

Travelling time is easy. It's the getting back to where I started that puzzles me.

The fountain at the back of his neck. Spewing. Victims. Old pennies lost in too many wishes he'll never grant. Old women. The scrape of pantyhose coming off without permission. Old men. Soft men. In thick casts. Pretending to be broken.

Time heals her in ways unexpected. The future arrives in gobs of phlegm. And she shallow each without ever thinking about the consequence.

All that sickness working its magic in the many dormitories of her skin. The relentless ambivalence of liars. A stubborn and cruel friend.

Tomorrow on the rim of the glass. Yesterday in the seam of her dress. As she discards it for truths far less ambiguous.

Long tails. The mule on the empty cart. Still pulling. Alone. Ambivalent. The sting of estrogen belittles her epiphany. The courage of thieves. To take. The wisdom of martyrs. Not to ask.

The rules of dead gods still heavy in her conscience. Blank sheets. To scratch at. With dried up pens. The words are there. Cockroaches humming in the darkness behind the walls. Only there when she's not looking. The years are certain. This many. No more. Drowning in her empty hands.

Short eyes. In tolerant confessions. Trying on the lie. In swatches of skin. The chill of denim. Paler than sleep. Pawns dressed as kings. The quantum. Canonical lapses in her field of. Alone. Ambivalent. Christ in little pills. Cures everything. And nothing.

Gods in tall hats. Alone with the man. He is good. He is bad. And everything a deity might want. But nothing that a woman would crave. The fissure stalls. Somewhere in the middle of the experiment. And sex is born. Touch only a manufacture of the mind. Irrelevant. Those protons playing tag. These cells their playground.

The end unfolds in brief surprises. No saviors. No demons. Just as I was. Am. The thrill of a dying. More slowly than I ever thought I could. The devil in fancy dresses. Crashing parties. Smudging their alibis. Murders in broken sentences.

The world stops and I get off. Or at least think I did. But everything is still spinning.

Not lost. Just can't decide where I'm going.

Take care with naming the parable. Count your wolves carefully. Make note of your little pigs.

Fairy tales are too much like skin. Asking so much. Proving nothing. Frankensteins on hte verge of sex. Monsters in her weekday. Borrowing from thicker concussions.

Words. In fits of oblivion. Gods debating. Ambivalent saviors.

The mythology of skin in paper cuts. So many gods. So little blood.


Just the nagging ache that accompanies the fear that i've said too much.

And the knowledge that the end to this coma lies within.

It takes too long to remember. Even longer to forget. And it only matter because it's broken. Because I want more than it is.

The rabbit in the orchestra. Was tuning its harp. 280 degrees at most she declared. It's just blood. Years of fruitless sex. Evolution not evolving. And so I am. Both perpetual and fleeting. As much as any comma is. Lost in the throes of rogue sentences. And ignorant paragraphs. As if the clock could measure. Or in any way quantify. The depth or currents of the ocean. Or speed up this drowning.

Life comes in sobs. Huffs of others' skin. Cloying and oppressive. Words like potions mark the start. And the finish. Liars tell their stories to the deaf. And I hear them.

Dull scissors cut out the paper dolls. Shaky hands unfold the results. I go too far. Too many of me. Too thin. Plain white rainbows sneak in after the rain. Offering a path to the sun, but no colorso at all. To accompany it.

The brake pedal in her heart full of fluid. The engine hot and trembling. With places she must go. Dirty pit stops on the road to nothing.

Lovers like roadkill.

Thw box on its side. Three dimensions to blame. For gravity. sleep. and sex. The book. The tape on its spine. Choking on the words inside. Picking at the pages. Hoping for new blood. The octopus. All eight arms grabbing at the hours given it. At dead skin. Threading the needle. Sewing the pieces together. With riddles of how it still matters if.

The noose. In small sips. Of lemonade needles. Presweetened skin. The citrus of his touch biting hard into stale meat. Take it raw. Red and wet with the things we have killed. Swallow slowly. Everything is dead.

The dollhouse. The gemoetry of men proving nothing. Taking off her tiny doll shoes. In compartments of why. The drug too distant. The excuse too close. The years. Proficient mimes. The hours wasted comedians. Lost and saved in the same breath.

The tv muted. The walls determined to know. Why she's still awake.

Two movies. One sad. Two hands. One empty.

Wake up! He shouted. I'm bored. But she had so been enjoying being deaf.

The hammock between her legs. Swinging softly with the absence. Of so many things she almost had. All skin is borrowed. She tries them on. All touch is artificial. Tastes sweeter than it is.

The science of alone. A debatable ratio of now and then. We are here. And there. The crush of possibilities soothes the dead. She stares. Anticipates him flipping that switch in her grin. The long laugh of curious molecules colliding with fact. Radiant heat. The catastrophe of together. Atoms colliding.

The map festering in her skin. Bloated blisters erupting with the places she's never been. Occasionally she convinces time to forget. but always. too soon. it remembers.

Playing cards with the devil. Betting everything on nothing. Pretending to know why there are.

Two bodies. But only one motive.

One nail of the wall. Waiting for a portrait.

Laughs the mimick in gelid chokes. A jelly smirk on rigid cheeks. I don't know love. And she doesn't know me. Strangers always. Strangers close enough to strangle each other. Fables taught in peeling skin. The moral always that I'm always naked. They can see all of me. Even from my hiding place.

New skin comes in retches. Bile. Acid. Flaunting up my throat. Spoiled badges of courage no one will read.

Choices. These clown shoes. Make me stumble. No matter how slowly I run. Lovers. These zippers behind my head won't stay closed.

Her face draw on her. By strangers with broken crayons. Her skin a dark outline on a blank page. Still waiting to be filled in.

It's not like I was trying. Was just pretending I knew what to do. With all these people.

The world isn't laughing at me. It doesn't even know I exist.

People. Random thieves. Empty graves. So amny keys we use as bait.

You want it to be over, but you're still sad when they stop trying to take it.

The bull calculates. Seldom matadors color in their capes. The darkness is a womb. I'm born too often. Ugly men. Like placentas spill out afterward. Useless now.

Tracing the vein. Road maps under my skin. Of drugs taken. And places I can never go again. Following the clown. His white face like sex. Stark and hard to forget.

The trial. The jury. Cogent manipulations. Failing arguments. Of lonely men. Pretty doors in the child. Broken window in the woman.

The lie in warm blankets. Still shivering. The hour demanding explanation. For the stories we are left with.

The parade in long confession. Stitches not set. The emergency room. Full of people. All of them me.

The rain. The words. Sheeting down from a pointed roof.

His words. Mosquito bites. My itch. Too deep to scratch. The virus in our skin. Infecting all our other parts. Touch. The contagion. That's killing everything.

His words. The cemetery. My eulogy. Alive in my coffin. Dead in my flesh. The clown nose in his face. The suspenders in his breath. I close my eyes and go there. I've never been anywhere else.

I stab the picture. Mosquito bites. Lingering itches.

I scratch. Until no skin is left.

The plan in his back pocket. The contingency bored with him.

What will we do now that itch has subsided.

The otherwise of empty steps. Calm predictions on worn shoes. I was walking. So loudly. Until silent came in vogue. The calm conspirators of frivolous demons as the pavement chirps with so much momentum.

The standard. Absolute strangers plot the maze that is my skin. Piling up walls. Diminishing the solution. The molecules. As ambivalent as ever. Takers. In pale restitution. Rebuild. The cracked faces of dolls we've dropped.

Limbless and naked in the arms of their savors. Their Satans. Their drunk gods with white gloves on.

The man. His soft beard teasing the hairs on her vagina. The premise. Skin the comedy. The rest a drama. Sex is Shakespeare. It doesn't rhyme at all, but looking back you'd swear that it did.

Everything wants a name. The dead are no exception.

The time machine between her thighs rages. Unfortunate lovers search for their gods. In the glassy eyes of dead poets. Heaven is shaped like a vagina. Purgatory looks like a dick. A leaky faucet dripping with wisdom's it's best not to swallow.

The time machine take her no further than she's ever been. The same stories she heard as child. Monsters she admits. Make the story interesting. If a story is a enough.

It's easy enough to go there. Embrace the physics of the skeleton. Stretches of skin too thin to cover us. We look for people to wear. Or zippers. Teeth at the back of their touch. Bites to blame for all that is missing.

Scratching hard at the freckles on her shins. Reasoning with the time machine. There's nowhere else to go. Except where I've always been. Take me there again. Convince them I never left.

The future between my legs. The past there too. Red. Red catapults. Heave their stones. At busy pigs.

I can show them where the hole is, but it's not something they can fill.

I still wait. For the wolf. To blow my house down.

In that abyss. The holes in her head propagating. Splinters of sound. Fidget under her skin. People. Fierce infections of touch determined to find her weakness.

She is not immune to lonely men. Nor sad men. But she often confuses them with the manipulative ones.

The canyon. The endless pit falling into my hands. Relentless downpours of nothing. Drown failing fists. Until I am incapable of holding onto anything.

Anyone.

Years later. Frozen parachutes make us fall faster. I cannot hear what you're saying. You speak too softly. And I have grown deaf from listening too hard for all the things I had hoped would be said.

She waits patiently for the parade to stop. Climbs aboard the float after all the spectators have stopped gawking.

No one knows. Or sees her there. As the hours turn dark again.

Pacing in the echoes of their footsteps. Imagining she is not alone.

Counting backwards from zero.

The lie. The bitter acumen. Of taste. Sermons of poison. Try to explain. What I don't understand. About this body. The bait not withstanding. The hook still through my lip. Waiting to be thrown back. Suffocating in the process.

This life. In failing increments. The balance. Not absolving. Masks too thick. Gods pretending to listen. As the locomotive buckles under the strain of the stop. The tracks singing their quiet song. In strains of lost. As if I could ever find what isn't there.

The apes in their fortress stuffing the cannons. Some war I've started, but cannot finish.

I blink and it's all gone.

Alone enough at last. To be certain. It doesn't matter.

And it never did.

The little kick from inside the big belly of the darkness. Incubating. The fetus. The hungry child of nothing determined to be born.

The longest day. Digesting. Breathing skin. Thundering chests. Roaring eyelids. The shortest night. The few words said. The miscarriage. Birth happens only as collateral damage. Life assumes it is self-evident. The insect thinks the world is small. However far it can walk. The dust lands. Escaping from soft skeletons. I'm getting smaller. I'm staring. At nothing. Certain it is there.

Because I say it is.

Because alone like this is not an option.

Not for long.

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.

Lie, she said. You always do it. Feet. Toes. Fingers. Pretending to know what they feel. Take me back, he said. I've gone too far. The future is passed. And there is no place for me to exist. I'm dead before I was born. I could save myself, but I won't.

Guilty wagers in between. That life and this one. Seams in the teddy bear favor the stitch. But I've lost my needle. I guess it's easy to forget. But it's just as easy to remember Just look.

Seeing comes in convulsions. Seizures of touch. An ambulance of lovers. Stuck in traffic. I don't mind dying. It's the waiting to I hate.

Stroke the apple carefully. Release the poison. Convince the devil you have a plan.

I don't want anything.

That is the problem.

The boomerang. Life constantly coming back. I'm only aware of everything.

And nothing.

That's what's wrong with me.

Sleep is loud. Charcoal eyelids breathe their methane. Insinuating explosions. The surface. The bomb. Completely innocent.

I hold the match.. I wait. For the world to blink. But it's never does.

Chewing loudly. I listen for the cartilage to ask. Where the bones have gone. Certain the future has an abundance of cannibals.

And that the past has all, but been consumed.

I can't taste anything. But I can feel it dying with each swallow.

Her wine in little baskets at her hips. Her grace directly apportioned. Busy vaginas pollinating faces. Fingers. Lips. Sorting the skeletons that accompany these modest disasters often termed happiness.

It's like I've never slept. Been staring at the world from the beginning. The art gone from it. Every stroke a cliche. Empty placeholders for. Because I've looked too long. For saving in the demons.

I'm under. below the flame. Last lies burning off in a boil of skin. The wax forming. shapes of touch conceding to the molds we've laid out for them.

Filling.

Bad dreams. Communicating. The tatter of the dolls. She still sleeps with. Still names as if anyone would recognize.

Their faces. Let alone their names. Or how she still finds them in a sea of broken faces.

Close enough. Or so the source conceded. Bow ties and tuxedos deciding the shape of softer skeletons. In the when. In the if. Time would allow. Safe passage for such anomalies as us. The cardboard valentine. The metered smile. Approving negligently of the touch. The dress. In long sequences of bourbon and beer. The afterward discarding us. In favor of more potent illusions.

I could die that way. There in the past. But how then could it have happened. I could go there. Tease the grapes out of their shoes. But whose footprints who have led me here.

The angels with their fingers on the shutter. Coaxing dead cameras from their comas. Talking us into thinking we had seen. Heaven. or some place near to it. Where solvent gods still answer questions of skin.

In nightmares we still trust aren't real.

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.