Open the buckle. Ignoring stuck zippers. What she wants isn't there. Never was. Turn down the scream. To a whisper. Black holes. Catapults of flesh. Launch the victims like weapons. Tempests transport these fictions to places where they still don't matter.

The socket wrench. Chugging against her grin. The future in adjectives. Cheap admissions of want. I use them too often. The past in verbs. There farther back I travel the more it becomes obvious. I never left. It's just physics. Not that complicated. Once you remove your skin. Then we're all just chaotic atoms looking for an empty container.

Cold fusion.

It happens.

Too often.

And these small containers are too big again.

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.

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.

Something close to now. Or maybe later. The time on his wrist fibrillating. Wide and assuming x is constant. The end. The truth in fits of vomit. The future names its price. The past negotiates. No one buys either one.

I was so young then. And now I'm not. I was everything. And now I'm nothing.

His eyes counting the minutes between pussy and friend. Different doses for different addictions. Maybe time isn't as smart as I thought it was.

We're always fooling it. Into thinking it owes us more.

Fire escapes on the back of her neck. Where the words argue with the their saviors. What to save. And when. Now. or Then?

Or isn't all the same.

Skimming the surface of heaven. Collecting my demons in broken math. The eternal paradox. I can go there. But if i do, I can never go back.

The time lines of lonely men answer enough.

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.

The coward is an ideal lover. Leaves me glad they are gone. That I know the difference between now and then. The crooked abacus in his pants counting backward from zero. The sad face on his watch looking up at me as I wondered how many hours we'd wasted ignoring each other.

The compartment. Stitches in the soles of her feet. As she stumbles forward. Through careless traffic. On crowded streets. Graves between her tits. Counting on their corpses to make them whole.

It's just intersections. All of it. The words we speak. The skin we grab. Dead flowers of seeds not planted. Calm paradoxes debating with empty underwear. Shrodinger's cat alive and dead inside his cruel experiment. Just like we are.

It's all about not knowing when to stop. Listening for the crack in the ice and stomping on it.

Purple confessions in the toes of her heels. Undressing a touch at a time until. Everything is far away. The distance measured in people. Not steps.

The colors concede to the darkness.

Beige cancers boiling between her lips. Control assumes her. Press the key. Keep pressing it until there is a response. The virus is only a side effect of all this sickness. The hours are just puppets in the rambling soliloquy of time. I catch the wormhole at its smallest apogee. It takes a picture of us. Before we were the future.

Whoever we were then, we weren't us.

The past such a benign conundrum. Often misused to further the logic of lonely people.

Time holds its breath. For as long as it can.

But I still drown it.

My constant varies. Everything else stays the same.

Come the saints in manic pause. Laden with paradise obese. And starving doors. Play. With broken toys in hollow rooms where no one talks. Children lost in over sized skins. Rewinding the highs of crashing Edens.

Face the bed. Coax the choice. In stumbles of trust that inevitably betray delicate demons. Not as evil as they thought they were. Trace the wrinkles in the dark with a heavy finger. Drawing pictures no one can see. Saying things no one can hear.

Pressing the pain for some relief from all this numbness. Every breath a siren. Rushing people away.

The universe is big, but the world is small.

When you don't want to be found.

I turn on the light and wait for someone else to see.

What I always have.

Damage control. Persuasions of right. In all its forms. Broken arms aruging with the cast. In murmured freefalls. As if no one else is there. The colors of hard discussing how to heal. Below the skin. Calcium on strings. Kites teasing the sky. In splinters. Marrow. Confiding in the flesh. How lonely it is. Alone inside the bone. Rigid. And unable to feel all the things happening to this life.

The skin. This profound mass of oragn tends to dominate everything. The skeleton waits for its chance. it just hasn't eyes to see it coming.

Sadly, I was the only one present when God finally admitted his accident.

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.

Scabs of snot on her bed linens. Indicate where she hides her face while she sleeps. Stolen away from this world in small steps. Stewing in dreams she can't remember having ever possessed.

Making up sex in small gulps of friends. The ceremony of touch carrying on long after she has stopped counting. The years between. Then and now. Angry bears coming home to messy beds and missing porridge. Dead girls in worn stockings failing to reason with circumstance.

Pretending she had heard him when he said she didn't know what. A kite. Its long string teasing her hand. That she could touch the clouds. Move the sun. See again.

Power she muttered to herself. Control. This decrepit time machine in my head keeps trying, but I'm still not there. Nor any closer than I was.

I keep soliciting the cancer. It doesn't answer. I've scared the disease away again. I always do. Frighten it. Dark clowns with too much to smile about. Love is just the punctuation in this slow death.

The prayers of monsters make beautiful songs when I'm alone like this. Wondering which time I'm in. Which one I've left behind to be here. Negotiating with the me's I've created going back so many times to find what was never there.

My favorite part being the paradox. For all this to have happened nothing before it could have.

I keep trying on their faces. Moments of math rationalize the skin. In chokes of drug hoping I'll remember their collapsing heavens. Reconstruct. All the lies life creates to make these habits seem worthwhile.

Those tight jeans. They do fit. If I hold my breath deep enough.

We can't go back. That would change everything. Still we must have. Because it's all different than I remember. At least this version of me. The crab grass is darker. The rainbows come less frequently. I dream in black and white, instead of color. The mice shit less.

He was a question. In every sense of the word. Essays on insecurity proliferating at every turn of his head. Where was I? I don't know. Somewhere near enough to observe, but too far away to know.

Skin like detergent washing away the dirt. Touch like bleach. Devouring the colors of moment. People like chewing gum bursting between my teeth. Sticky faces and dead cells trying to manage a lifetime of experiences. Hollow conversations pouring like liquid plastic into molds that would make them fit only after they had happened.

Perhaps it always was. Or maybe it will never be. I can't know that until I find my way back to before we were.

If I could travel time. If I may ever have. No one knows. Until it happens. And then they forget by the time it does.

If I could go back. Stop this life before it gets to where we are now. If I could go back, why would I. If I'd been successsful there'd be no reason. Nothing to go back and fix.

Nothing changes. Or can be changed. Nothing except what we want from it.

It's the truth. Albeit a disputed one.

Long branches twist the sunlight into knots. All we get are punches. Glass doors wearing people like condoms. Revolving until everything is said without a sound.

It's a lie. These pieces of skin on my plate looking like people looking for names I can't remember. Watches not keeping time. Not our time together. Or apart. The anguish of the universe. That it can't subtract. It must keep expanding until we are all alone.

Time digests and expels us. We nourish it. We make it sick. Until our disease is its only sustenance. Our only desire is to live. Our only purpose is to die.

Vomiting up each other in perfect meter, but flawed rhyme. Adding to these heavy skins.

I dreamed my cactus died. The pot fell over. A sneeze of dirt and ceramic opened up its concealed grave. It had no roots at all. No life inside it.

But it's falling revealed a discovery. Underneath it another. Bigger. Greener. Sharper still.

Always on the surface the dead thing.

Underneath it.

Life.

Cardboard statues in the rain.

It's a lie. That's true, but it's a truthful one.

Take your spasms away with you in tiny tears. Loose fit skin that sells for much more than cost. The sleepwalk is the best I can do. Lies untold. Unexpected. And therefore not cruel. Ghost never buried. Let the dead free to scold us. The rulers down our backs keep us staring at the empty blackboard. Chalk dust writes its eulogies. We attempt to measure moments, But they're too small to count. Fingertips at the ready to taste the freedom time has absolved.

Chosen. By design. Broken crayons still try to color in the empty outlines.

This pale solution to such vivid nightmares. Is just to wake up.

Turn off the demons like light switches. Let the darkness decide.

Where I am.

He was speaking in skins. Lifting weights on every breath. Waiting for the rotten fruit to become edible again. Bartenders in some fairy tale of blinking eyes that never happen to see what's staring at them.

Hearing the stop sign, but deciding not to listen.

Life. Like bubble gum breaking between careless lips. Stuck to faces that quickly forget.

Laughing sadly about the many haunted houses we've slept in to get to this one.

The stones seek their language. In bit and pieces. The doctor is overcome by his medicines. Tongues. Like treasure maps. Counting the steps to heaven.

She imagines the cradle in the tree rocking. Full of hope someone has to hate.

Pop!

She continues chewing her gum. She loves the taste of nothing.

Cupid's on heroin saving up the methadone.

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.

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.

The child. Deciding. The crippled dog. Hunting. So outside. Novel Coloring books in her skin imagining where his reds would go. The ambulance. The stretcher. Preparing for the worst of the blood. Deciding I would only bleed so much. Letting them. Create the suicide. In little leaps between dimensions.

You were there, but I was gone. The fable proving us wrong again. As if I couldn't live long enough to determine if the moral was accurate.

Paper dolls. Strung together. Mouths drawn in after the fact. Paper dolls. Hands near enough to touch.

Some unknown. Perpetual epiphanies conceal chronic relapses. She's a princess. In doll clothes. Foil earrings and fingers of petroleum. Sparse rain falling into broken reservoirs.

Terminals. Eyes like dashboards. How far we've gone to get back to where we started. Love is casual. Love is certain.

We are not.

Waking the dinosaur in small increments. Doses of clarity only make it harder to see in this darkness.

Every breath is a habit. An addiction of some sort. Touch the evidence. Orgasm the proof. Assembling each other as we do. Shoving the puzzles peices into places they don't belong. Living as thoughtlessly as we do. Trying on wings that don't belong to us. I don't want a cure. Just a better sickness.

I slept through my own funeral. I didn't want to know who wasn't there.