Lost old men. Their meaty skeletons pointing out the whores. Lonely men. Their thirsty cocks confounded by a sea of women.

Sometimes he hates himself. When that is the easier task. The freedom of failure is something to consider.

Sometimes he hates them. The callous world at large. The sluts and scabs of pussy that dare demand his worship for such limited pleasures. Bleed. Do it. Bleed some more.

She says, stay alone. You're better off. And so am I. This mutual disease usurps us both. And I know very well, lies when I hear them.

It's only sad because you are. It's not my fault. It's only dark because the earth is anxious. To keep spinning. And here I am stuck on it. Foolish enough to think anyone else is.

I'm always left with this stone in my fist. I'd throw it, but I'd break myself if I did.

The trouble with time is that it doesn't travel fast enough. Old women. Old men. Still children to us.

He's as ugly as I remember. And as handsome.

The moon was close. The stars were far. She had her time machine in her back pocket. So she could go back without being seen. So she could prove the doll wasn't naked, but later undressed. To sneak the poison into those needles. Steal the vaccine from the disease.

Don't try too hard she warned him. as the dress obscured her face. Blindness is a condition of wanting what we can't have.

Tell me the truth. That I don't matter. And never will. That you're more defective than empty beds can cure. Tell me lies. That I mattered. The friction of clean sheets on dirty skin. The cage door opening. All prisoners afraid to leave.

The moon gets too close sometimes. Especially when you're looking up. The lies will do. Melting snowmen. Time machines to argue with. As everything and nothing.

changes.

I thought you knew better than to trust. Broken levers. The selfish math of time machines consuming us.

The oblong path of younger skin imagines us still there. Lithe branches darning holes in the sky. Sharp needles in shaky hands. The minimal. The broader deficit. Of the wait for some reaction. The hopscotch. The stone in her fist. Electing villains. The count. Of steps. Long jumps between now and then. Heavy freighters of touch loosely docking on stubborn clamps/

Gods don their clouds and pretend the rain is our fault. Sleep like bracelets. The machine. The man. Tell em the difference. Touch decides ambivalent heavens. Dreams the charms. Skin the clasp. Woken up by the same men. Hell feels familiar. More comfortable than it should.

The windows. The curtains. The stamina of dead dogs. As we approach each other. The snake with its jaw unhinged. Easy to kill during its feast.

All these poisons insufficient.

I talk to the tortoise. He says I went to fast.

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.

One color more. Sheets coming undone. In fits of skin. As if we were alive once. Or something similar. More than just time in its infinite travels. Or the remnants its fire leaves behind.

Just colors. Dots anticipating the sun. In sharp bends of light that break too often.

What was easy is hard again. Preachers on the pulpit blame Satan. But I know, amongst us the devil is innocent.

I see the answers. I just never write them down. I psh the switch on the lamp still expecting darkness.

I'm not alone, but it's too close. Gathering her robots. She warns them tomorrow is arrogant. And we are merely the consequence.

Of lazy gods and spoiled children.

The pig smiled. Bloody. Lacking cheeks. Laughed loud. Through crispy skin.

Feeble are the moments that insist on this life happening. Dead snakes sifting with poison. Wearing the fangs. Flaunting the footprints. In frozen eyes. Seeing. In thick ears tempted to hear. Fat tongues. Trying to say.

Everything.
Is strange.

Lies I wish to live. Sheets I cannot replace. Though they are stained. Words I cannot take back, though they've never been said.

All these gods shouting my name in unison. As if I exist. As if I matter at all in these numerous worlds we vainly attempt to claim.

Everything is strange.

All these paradises are tentative. Every curiosity is a threat. As the tree leans in closer to tempt us with knowledge.

I don't want to know. Never did.

Everything is strange.

As her panties come off. The sincerity of the lie is medicine enough.

Everything is strange.

Everyone is a stranger.

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.

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.

Lateral evolutions weaken the ape. Try on these triangles. whispered the alien from its hover copter. Discard your books. And your nimble thumbs. Concentrate on skin. That's the most you can hope to understand at this early stage.

Slaughter the cows. Steal the fish from the sea. Consume it all. Accelerate your starvation.

I was laughing because it was quite humours. The prospect of dying because we'd never estimated our future. The hours so proper. The minutes so slutty. Progress in doses. Easy to swallow. Harder to digest. As tomorrow approaches.

The luxury of life becoming a burden.

For all but the richest among us. This is what America wanted all along. But what no one expected. This is the legacy of capitalism. The apathy of the everyman.

For which all our children will suffer.

This is the car we drive. The condom we don't wear. Because we don't ever think about the end. Even when it's this close.

Alternatives. Casual dilemmas thicken the words. There are no lies. Haven't you learned? Just variations on truth and the dragons that guard the treasures they keep.

Old comes quickly, but young is slow. Happiness is piercing. A siren. Life is everything after. Life is a long process. Of recovery from the things we think we need. And most of all from those we cannot have.

The decisions. Corkscrews drawing out that deep cork. Releasing the drug. In fits of skin. Trying on all those people. Testing gowns I'll never dance in.

Pretty girls under the porchlight looking quite sad. As they drown in their own blood.

Testing the battery she startled at the shock. Of closing the circuit. A small touch. Power. The wince of a skin transcending touch. Charged. Iterated. Exponentially. In a pandemonium of careless motions warring to extract pleasure from the tirelessly hollow endeavors of men.

It is the pulse of America. Beauty. Lust. Indulgence. Imperfections exploited. All bonafide business models. They all want to be save from themselves.

Avoiding the question she trudged on toward the voices. The prohibition dense in her plans for a new world. Life arrives in hiccups. Nervous stutters of then spoil her utopias.

She blames the drugs all brains produce. Loud songs in her head and rumpled sheets beneath her comforter. The regrettable histrionics of flesh based organisms. Accordions of sex wheezing out fragments of men. Love speculating on the wealth of my regret.

Slighted angels blowing their bugles into the ears of deaf men. Describing heavens they've never seen.

Dominoes deciding whether to fall. The giant clinging to the vine. In bare combustibles. Love is a target. We just random throws of darts.

I was looking back in time. Seeing it look at me. In years that had already happened. Still no truth emerging from the fates we'd shared.

I was casting spells. Working the magic of the timeline. Pieces of tomorrow spilling into my potions. The paradox blossoming into somewhere new.

We were creating each other. In places neither of us had been. High on the drug of missing ghosts. Crippled hearts that walk. Only to return to the graves they never saw dug. Bodies. Corpses on the edges of the decision that would make this timeline stick.

There are so many others that would be better, but this is the one that I want.

Alone.

Wearing tomorrow against my thighs in whispers of when. Time was still some place we had in common.

The little lies time tells to make us happen. All the ways in which we never do.

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.

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.

You leave in your mind before you're ever really gone. Discarding theoretical lips. Wringing the words down the drain. Soiled soap carries the filth away. In permutations of a karma that fill the holes in our flesh with dead skin.

And so we wait. for the new to come and push it away.

The very idea is poison. Surfactants convince the moments to mix. Lies like detergents soften the soil that keeps up apart. We're barren. Not clean. We haven't saved ourselves. We've orphaned them.

In the candy store which so much resembled his hardening heart. The molecules of sugar discussed the differences between sitting on the shelf and being eaten. It was, they supposed, suicide either way. Or murder. Depending how much you hate yourself.

Tracing the sun through a dirty pane of glass. Thick markers make a mess of the finer points. It's only art if you can't control it. It's only beautiful when it defeats us.

Yesterday. Even after tomorrow it still weighs so much.

Time is agile and stubborn. Underwear still smelling of transient debates with touch. It says it knows, but I don't think it does. How brief the moments are that divide then and now. Trial and error. Myself and her. A little girl. Some fatty discharge hidden under an old scar. The faint hint of puke in a forgotten taste of someone else.

Calm morticians painting the smirk on dead faces. In desperate scribbles I find too familiar.

Epitomes like bubble gum. Expanding. And bursting all over our faces. Synonyms of change negotiating a treaty with dead men.

You can always talk to a ghost. It will always listen, but it'll never say what you want to hear.

Find me in doses of infinity. Discarded panties hung like curtains over our eyes. The smell of rainbow we can't see penetrating skin we never knew we had. Find me in an ed suicide. Some stranger you almost met vanishing. Leaving you burdened with their life . Silver spoons dishing cold soup. Scorpions being watches buy desert men. Ready to be stung. Ready yo be sink. If only to recover from the poison.

The life written in permanent ink. The skin all colored in. Her touch a rainbow after the drizzle of her kiss.

Find me in someone else. A lie I'll never admit to telling. An infinity of skin. A million colors all looking for the source.

Tell her. Before she stops listening.

The small cancers in her smile were grotesque, but for the most part benign. She could write a novel with just the still of her lips. As they antcipated lazy eulogies of sex. If it's dead, she thought, I cannot have a funeral for it. Because it was selfish of it to die first. If it's dead, she reasoned, let it be dead the same way that it lived. Unnoticed.

The eyes talk to the lips when there's nothing else to do. Each thought a carbeutartor in her head filtering the exhaust. Poorly constructed costumes betraying the illusion. Diaperless babaies drowning in their own shit.

She factual in the lies she wears. Frenetic evening gowns court their heavens with a wealth of sequins and a good dose of cleavage. She sighs that it's close enough, determined that it isn't.

Her cancer comes and goes as it pleases. Perhaps with the weather. Her lips suffocate in the words. Her voice has amnesia. She reads their faces. Like she would any petition. Let someone else struggle to save what is already lost.

She was a tortoise once in an old fable. She doesn't remember. How it turned out.

Remembering the moment. Pale paint drying on thin brushes. The cartoon in your fall. Looking down at the nothing beneath your feet. Not falling until you see it. Me. Passing this anvil onto you. The words above your head so clear.

She draws in pen. She draws in ink. Pencil is for the young. Pencil is for those that still think that they can erase. Or that they would want to. She draws in circles. The beginning is the end. Like she remembers her nightmares. Like she knows her life is.

Fretting her skin. Like used sleeping pills. Waking up in strange beds. Counting the men like raindrops. The heavens sweating down on her as she hurries to keep up with them.

No more dead things. Just the soil between her toes as she catches the last petal of the last flower. No more gardens. Just the dead coming back again. Until all gods are liars.

Over talks in riddles. Les its sock fall down. The pasty arithmetic of purchased men. And those that are bankrupt.

Drawings in the water like food coloring on the softest of your wounds. Playing the song with missing chords. Saying the prayer to gods you've given up on.

We're all dealers. Doling out the future to strangers across the tables. We're all bettors. Wagering on the bluff. We've been fooled before. It could happen again.

Losing isn't that different from the win. Except that you wonder sometimes whatever happened to them.

Measuring the strength of their wisdom by how much it hurt.