It was in yesterday that tomorrow became clear. Fundamental ghosts. The attic unprepared for their visit. The election. Time campaigning hard. To move me. The bridge. Frozen in the open positions. All ships able to pass through. No one. Nothing. Capable of crossing it.

I had apples in my basket. Trees I could recall looming in the shade of. Still young enough to assume the fruit would always fall.

Skin. Depth. Long streaks of comic book. Sheets drying in the wind. Thougthless. The clean stolen from them.

The words on the small of her wrist. Minutes counting to nowhere. Nothing. The world. In hungry slurps. Drinking us in. As we were only water. To quench. Its endless thirst.

For people. Excuses. That it should still be here. After all these years of having disappointed us.

Time stops every now and then. No one notices. The skins the world has shed. Or the people who are counting the minutes until it starts again.

Flesh. Calm matador of when. Urge the bull to rush.

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.

Carve the hole. Deep enough. A renaissance of touch. In practical liaisons. Remember. Forget. I don't care who you are after we're over. It's only circumstance. The dollhouse Trying so hard to look like the real thing.

I don't care who I was then. Or who I'll be after. I am. Now. Whatever this might be. Candy house in the woods. Falling down. The abandoned misled by the sweet.

Blood like umbrellas. When it's not raining Men like elevators. Navigating skyscrapers of skin. I lose them, in the afterward. The pale telepathy of the testosterone. Wanting so much. And so little.

Every thing's the same.

Nothing is.

Find the hole. Lie to it.

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.

The quantum of her frown. The mechanics of her stare. Dimensions discovered. Time travel in the purest sense. We go back. We remain here. Stretched between the world we exist in and the one we remember once lived in us.

I don't have a shadow where I am. Just men masquerading as equations. Plus. Minus. Exponents. There is no light from above to mark my stand. But I know I am standing here. Not looking back.

The volume of his loneliness is calculated in simple terms. Multiply the man by the women. Determine if he has had enough of them.

Extraneous vaginae make him masculine. Finding the one he wants makes him a man.

It's hard to say what I want. Other than nothing. The sweep of flesh into the volatile Chambers of careless touch. The buck of angry hours as we try to ride them into narrow slits of future. The saddles on their backs thick between the moments we try to pair.

The reins we grasp a trivial component of a greater chaos. I could be your future. And your past. But anything else is just the loneliness demanding a fair percentage.

What I lose. What I've lost to them. Comes back. In dead flies to empty from the lamp. Changed the bulb or live in the dark. I can't decide. What I want to do.

What I could want. Anything I could expect. I know who you are. I won't dare to wait for you to be someone else.

I wouldn't try to dissolve the layers of time between us. But I sometimes think its closer than I had anticipated.

Fools and women try to reconcile the math of absent men.

Close enough.

Or too close still.

It's hard to know.

Not bending down. Trying to pick up. The shadows.

Is dark enough.

Years she said. With Vaseline in her eyes. Cloudy and slick with a devastating permanence. Dimes in the washer waiting to be found. Ten more wishes I'll never get to make. Clothes on the floor looking too much like I'm still in them. Breathing in the stabs of moonlight that slither through vinyl and glass bars.

Moments that strut out the front door only to later sneak in the back. Shame. Ringing dead doorbells and listening to dial tones. The weak songs that put me to sleep when drugs disappoint. As they often will.

Just like people. Only more loyal. More human.

A lifetime. Several I think. And still trying to understand. Anything at all.

Evil? Of course. Good? Just as much so. Shit in the snow. Almost too much contrast. To see which is which.

Shaky hands open the door. Close the window. It's cold outside. It's hot within. Leaning close. For the first taste. A negative slowly developing upon her lips.

Then becomes forever. Now becomes if.

Photographs of faces. Calm tragedies occur in silence. Heard only by the deaf. The words spew in shattered ricochets of tongue. Nervous. Putty cheeks offer truth as their only confession. Ignoring every wish. She bites down.

Destroying the fountain.

The piglets in their little houses. Each one quite oblivious. Until the mortar. And the bricks.

Not falling down has its disadvantages. I miss the wolf. The bluster and pomp of fear. Exposed and hopeless as the world tumbles into to a temporary sanctuary. The pulse of skin counting the moments While we trace their footsteops. In thick pieces of chalk. That remind me of dying. In the deep scratches on the asphalt that we make as we walk.

Stepping cautiously over the bodies we don't want to be in. Peeling the glove from the thought in sweaty dismissals of whom. How. And when.

Cracking the egg. Poison in my palm. Close my fist and squeeze. Until there is a difference between then and now.

Amuse me. Make it hard to laugh. Soil. Preaching to her toes. Grass. Jesus naming the creatures again. They're still new enough? He begs.

Strong. Bitter words contradict. The melodies of the damned. I was a scarecrow for a while. Lying about what was guarded. To the hungriest. I was straw. And old shirts. No one would want to wear again. Telling the lies the grown tired of.

I was fields. Tall stalks. Striving for the sun.

I could hear their footsteps. Roll in the mud of each decision. Hookers raising their pieces. as the need tapers off. Small flowers on long stems. Hoping the rain will return. Hoping that the rain that has fallen will last.

Her skin like a drugstore. waking up. Tomorrow seems a punishment. The disease more relevant than the cure. Trying on new men.

They're all old she says.

Nothing's changed.

Deafness sour on her parting lips. Her eyes the verb. Her ass the adjective. In short lived narratives called touch.

Done.

The barbarians satifsfied. The clock indifferent. As she sauntered between now and if. The future on its toes. Windows everywhere. To glimpse. To imagine. The names of colors we'd so often used. The past on catapults. Without a clear target.

The deafness. The fungus of her fingers. Spreading. In deep infections. Unreachable itches.

The reservoir. Pennies gathered. In a thousand misplaced wishes. Collecting dimensions. Parallel to the moments. Travelling time in thrusts and jabs. Cutting her wrists with the sharp edges of the sheets.

Bored.

Uninterested.

Fingers and toes. Eyes and lips. Clay pots drying in an empty oast. Hardening so long.

Just to make the falling matter.

Structure. The dark counting toes. Fingers. Naming the tiny hairs on the back of her neck. As it comes from behind her. In quick autopsies of the moment the cause of death is determined.

Delirium. Torn parachutes carry on fingertips of wind. Feign flight in their falling.

Candles sweat. And cameras bark. Half way up broken ladders. In buildings on fire. On dolls we once thought real. The skin falls off. And I begin to love the skeletons that they are left.

Awakened by the sun. Closing my eyes again. Trying to see.

The blood on those pretty pitchforks. Panties searching for their pussies. For their periods. Blood and children all the same to skin. Flaunting the obvious. Men and gods the same when you're a woman. Easy to manipulate. Lost in a seas of tits.

I think Satan was right when he said man shouldn't have free will. It's wasted on us.

Can't wake up. Peel the polish from her ass. In chokes of color no one sees. Can't fall asleep. Dissemble the skeleton. Label the bones. For later. When war is tired enough. To consider surrender.

Lost.

Life is just this. These hours. Doomed to contemplate all the things that haven't happened. Life is strong. It goes on and on. Life is fragile. It's constantly tripped. By the footprints we made before it found us.

I am lost. Too far ahead. Waiting for the world to catch up. Telling lies I already know they won't believe.

Now. Like a guillotine. Comes crashing down. Headless aggregates assume the limbs left behind by the dead.

I was only talking to myself. Afraid to say it out loud. Camping out in my skin. Thinking the whole time about being somewhere else again. I was reading silently. Because that's always how I read him. Turning pages in the dark. Feeling for the impressions of the letters.

People are like long division. I like to do it short. Upside down. Discarding the remainders.

I always listened, but it was hard to hear. A bark is a bark no matter what it's trying to say. The world spills in, no matter your barricades. Pieces of finger. Bits of faces. A docile cancer that begins in the head and suddenly erupts into every extremity. The comfort of touch slowly poisoning our ample purgatory.

The problem isn't that we're waiting for heaven, but that it's not waiting for us.

It's not the dying that's a problem. It's how long it takes.

People are time. In its most basic state. The thrust of space pressing down hard. On tender atoms. Undecided. The grin of the quark. The frown of the electron. The spatial dances of the tiny elements that makes us feel so large.

And so small.

The line was long. Chasing itself. Time is Celsius. Memory is Fahrenheit. Trying to go back she ran into herself. Again and again. They'd argue about which one belonged where.

Wolves huffing and puffing over already demolished houses. Dead pigs. Spoiling in a grave of bricks.

The future to go there she knew has to have many instances. The future, to exist, had to be prepared for any and all choices.

The future, she could always smell, miles off. Like a burning barbecue. One timeline after another collapsing into the bonfire. We start at the end and work our way back to something reasonable. Or at least, something we can comprehend. Writing first the lies, hoping to find some truth in them.

Collecting those superfluous selves one at a time until the future is dead again.

I'll never be a hammer. But I'll still want to pound the nail in.

Tomorrow is too much. Today too little.

There may have be ladders. Or ascension mechanisms of some sort. Steps of barbed wire. Nooses of laughter. The beauty of women is in their effortless power. Just sit. Look pretty and wait for the world to stop spinning.

Her eyes were closed. His penis was close to her lips. She didn't really taste anything other than disappointment. She opened her eyes are ttried to imagine something more elegant.

She could feel the cotton trying to find her as she dosed the darkness. Long gowns insisting she wear them. Even if they didn't fit.

Take it apart later she told herself. The pieces will always be available. Blame the mediator she shouted. This false prophet called our skin. I take it off. It just grows back again.

Cocksucker. Formaldehyde lips grin deep. With jagged teeth. Missing underwear. Yellow fangs. Bitch. Melted chocolate on severed fingers. Cast the flag. Silence the piper. The rodents have taken over heaven.

Each moment is my savior. As I stumble one to the next. Each hour is my judge as I pierce the skin of so many fallen apples. You can cry god, but he never cries us. Liar in the sky drowning his ant farm.

To start another.

As if we never were.

Or had been his likeness.

He's the failure. Not us. And therefore is inadequate.

Heaven, I have found, lies precisely in the middle between the entry and the exit of unsolicited cocks. A kingdom of torn vaginas hoping to cover their asses.

Doubt. Delusion. Whitney Houston in a cheek bone store. No staircase. Just stones for going down. And up. Up. And down. Sally Struthers in the back of the book. No text. Just numbers counting backward from zero.

Pretty monkeys on the gold swingset humming songs no one's written yet. No music. Just sound crawling away from its soiled bed.

Like all the little girls I used to play with when I was alone.

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.

All this breathing. It's insidious. Rape the teddy bear to spare the semen. Ejaculation frescoes glimmer in the shadow on her molting skin.

You're changing, he said. You can't wear that anymore. It's too big. It's too small. You don't want to be found. You want to be discovered. You're a fossil. A fragment of bone in the dirt wondering what it feels like to have skin. Or even be a part of a skeleton. Structure. And whole playing their monopolies in red hotels. Sensible lies that make it easier to fall asleep.

I don't want gardens. Or flowers that only appear when the weather is temperate. I want deafness. Dead things. And lost words. Ghosts confident enough to scare us.

You can't be born knowing. You must learn. Through process of elimination. The names of each of those teddy bears. The color of the shit in their underpants. The reason it's still there.

I can't hear you, she advised. I haven't heard anything since we took off our clothes.

How young was I then? The insipid traffic of youth conveying itself through crowded intersections in bedtime stories stolen from hungry wolves and dead pigs.

You can only be mortal. Can only forgive yourself if you're certain no one else will. Still I can dismiss these heavens for something real.

Dog shit on the carpet. Bills to pay and lies to utter. Open zippers at the back of my neck waiting for someone to pull on them.

As if we can choose who we are. Screw the umbrella. Let it rain on me.

My words don't mean anything. Waking up without them. Falling asleep to their dying. These tabloids of skin tell so many lies. It's impossible not to read them.

Jiffy pop hearts expand until the cracks are all they have to covet. Wrinkled aluminum dances against the heat. Subtle drugs pretend to know us un all the ways known else ever has.

Touch lies so well that I almost believe it.

When it says I can feel them.

Floods Cereberal. Motion Flaunts Pixels of Skin In Broken Libidioes. Little fibs make us better.

Little women bleed out their gods in missing children. Words on their wrists sharper since they've stopped try ing to prove the world doesn't end where they do.

I once was lost, but now, I'm just trying not to be found. Wet maps to a buried treasure some might call not looking for it.

It tears away. With a purposeful sound. Almost as if we'd ever been connected.

God laid down his hand. The Devil had won again. Even Satan has his triumphs. Even God has his failures.

I may not be real. Neither of us is, but I'm the one they love. When bad things happen it's you they hate. But when someone is saved it's me they worship. That world is all theirs. It doesn't belong to either of us. We're not real until they're frightened. Orphaned gods still shitting in their pants. Wanting to be changed.

They crawl toward the parents they've never had. The guidance they lack. From a universe too cold to care for the children it has birthed. They cry when they are bruised. And hate because they feel abandoned by the parents they've never had.

There's just children. Lost in learning the art of empathy. Doomed to fail without us. Though we're not real. They're just helpless gods sweating heavens from every pore. Soliciting angels with big bills on dark corners.

They'd rather be saved than do the saving themselves. Were I real I'd say I am the only excuse they have left.

And I haven't known who to save sinc that last episode of Star Trek.