Colors. Pebbles scraping her palms. The painting. In long strokes. He never finishes. Wise drugs working on the edge fo his tongue. The child in her torn frock. Addressing a failing crowd. Liars eager to pounce.

Crayons. Dark lines slowly filling in. The child. In failing underwear. Biting down on the thermoter. Swallowing the mercury. Soft metal running through thick veins. Coiled and venomous. As these bits of skin.

Backwarde in the time machine. Counting nothing. The promise blossoms. Dead flowers. Rain. Choices. Bound to the time machine flesh travels away from us. Spreading its cancer. Leaving bheind only the skeletons.

And dying things I cannot save. Drowned in the lies we use to love each other. Years. Butterflies sneezing. Changes. Negotiating with these time machines too stubborn to admit.

That they were wrong.

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 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.

There is nothing else like. The rabbit in the noose. The chair not toppling. Old friends. And new ones. Debating whether I should live. There is no alone quite so stringent as that of not wanting to be.

I got over it.

Pull on that mask. So they won't know you're watching them.

Gather the words. Festering manipulations that fail to infect. I'm too diseased to notice the sickness suggested. Tell them that you love them with a roar. And that you won't with a whisper. Tell them anything they want to hear. They're not listening anymore.

The bad men come dressed like saints. White sleeves and black bow ties. Because they never soil themselves with the misfortunes of others. Good men smell of piss. Because they reach down to pull others from it.

Lies. The sedative. That shuts up all missing limbs. I don't need to walk away. It's just as profound, if not more so, to crawl. But I think you're wrong. It's not hard at all to make friends.

The difficulty lies in keeping them.

My flaw is that I need them to love me.

Flesh like lawyers. Still blaming the victim.

Something like falling asleep. And also like waking up. Trying on the meat. Her underwear red. Her bra too loose. I don't know. Don't want to know. What I haven't seen since this blindness. Mousetraps at the edge of my world killing anything capable of finding the cheese.

I'm over. I'm already done a long time ago. Puppets are left. So to their strings. I can't stop them from making me dance.

Words favor the liars. Actions favor the strong. What am I? Just the lonely branch at the top of the tree. The monkey with the novel in his hand that no one can read.

Where I was. Where I am. Places like carbon. Duplicating. Coins dancing in pockets.

Waiting for time to stop.

Or for someone to notice it still hasn't begun.

I could go anywhere. If I ever bothered to try. I could go anywhere, but it's so hard to leave where I've been.

Ripe cold sores accuse her lips. Of saying too much. Hearing nothing she begins her journey again. The start and the end interchangeable amalgams better suited to the chemistry of touch. Girl. Woman. Child. I wish I knew the difference.

You can live hard on the quarry of defeated men. Or you can live softly in the velveteen of cowering addicts. It's not the choice that's hard. It's the afterward. Deaf hammers pound mute nails. The wolf exhales on the piglets. Straw houses blown down. All these lives a lengtty fairy tale.

Little girls in the bellies of beasts. Fooled by beds.

There are villains in the soup. For sure. Old stews that sat on the stove far too long. Flecks of gods in damaged men showing us glimpses of heaven. The real one. Not what the angels would have us believe.

Martyrs she squealed. All of them. Sweating the smell of panties like an unjust execution. Penises trying on every aspect of the woman. dissatisfied with the complexities of becoming men.

Flesh judging quickly. The accused. The desperate. The victims. All the same it speculated.

Justice is in the first taste. Everything after is punishment.

In the prick of the dominoes on their tongue. As each one knocks the next one down. Confessions of truth failing us. In the faults of skin that crumble like whole cities. Still the earthquake is a disappointment.

This whole disaster wasted on the dead.

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.

I'd like more choices. Two aren't enough.

When I choose not to decide no one listens.

He has the road maps on his ass. I just didn't follow it. Now I don't know where I am, except that no one else is here. I shunned those little conformities. And now I've been shunned by the bigger ones.

I think god sells lemonade on the side of road. In wooden stands. Out of plastic pitchers. Like any child would. Broke and naive to the conditions of humanity. I think god is the big bad wolf in all those fairy tales where children get eaten. Cut his belly open. Save them. Save everyone.

From the paranoia. The hysteria of those that would try to control us.

I think love isn't that different. Serving best only those that would abuse it. Taking advantage of the rest.

I think I'm thirsty. And I'd gladly buy any one's lemonade. Including god's. if it could cure my thirst.

But I'm just silly like that. I want results.

The window was open. Just a bit. The darkness wheezing in careless and distracted through a lazy mesh. It was getting warmer. The seasons change for some. Their environment the detonator. The seasons change. Stoic and uninterested in how we are affected.

She watched. As her skeletons tried on their new flesh. Certain some would fit. Or at least, that she could make it so. The puke of skin paramount in all her decisions. Both selfish and selfless.

She wasn't sure she'd ever been the latter, but assumed there must have been moments. When even open windows still couldn't see. What was right in front of them.

And that she had determined was her only advantage.

A lie is only as good as the person who tells it. They're seldom told by good people. But when they are I listen.

The window was barely open. The darkness wasn't even listening to what I had to say. I was trying to write. Pretending that I could.

Close that window and still still see. The people on the other side of it. Become that glass that knew. What was so close. So far away. Lie again. Say I could see. What mattered most.

Or ever had. Tried to mean anything.

Little explosions more than enough to kill everything.

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.

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.

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.

Her dress being bored with her she took it off. In bits and pieces. Like dissassembling a giant jigsaw. Words are pretentious. Or otherwise self-serving. Still, I have nothing else to offer. Thoughts. Bloody tampons I'm afraid to discard.

The life inside my abdomen cycling. On and off. In graceless spasms of missing children. And people forgotten. Or at least I tried to. Forget.

Sleepy gods on ambivalent crutches hurrying the legless along. In arrogant parades that only make it that much harder to get home.

I can't take everyhing off, but I can still be undressed.

The dead match promising to light your last cigarette,

Trenchcoats of skin making every one small. The rain deciding who we'd be next. Sad faces drawn in dirty clothes. Waiting for the floor to forget. The flood that made all these lies possible. Blisters on her eyes finally bursting open. The truth infects us. Makes us weak. Turns this drowning grey. Sparse deaths feeding perpetual comas.

At one with the paranoia of a healthy heart. Committed to the promise of loss.

I stood out in the rain memorizing each drop I was able to catch. Then I went inside and began subtracting how many I'd missed.

There was no counting involved. Just a lot of lions with their cages drawn on. And too many people with erasers.

She was more or less sober. Defiantly so. With big tattoos on her brain in gaseous spasms of neon. With letters bigger than the paper she was writing on. Sober. Like a fawn is just before it's eaten. Sober she thought. Just like the sky is right before it pours.

Men she proclaimed are like free ketchup packets. You can take as many as you want, but who would take more than a few. You tear them open with your teeth and pretend the meat you're eating tastes better than it does. Calm like the breath of heavy ribs trying to decide how much of that skin is theirs.

She lies and says she doesn't know why no one's listening. And everyone is. Paled decisions blot out the landscape of skin. And she must choose. Again. Which lie to believe.

Her own or others.

Lie to me she thought. The truth has nothing to do with it.

Her eyes unravelling like cellophane wrappers. Soft candy with a hard center. She told him to bite down. Reveal her weaknesses. Release the goo that means I'm human. Because I don't know if I am a person. There are flaws in all things. So where is my proof. That this long game of monopoly has any purpose other than to make me lose.

Passed go too many times to remember.

Bought Park Place thinking I had won.

And I would have if it weren't for those damn hotels.

How can you know I'm lost unless you've been there?