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.

The autumn of her lips falling. Mediocre suicides. Stabbing. Heels and nail polish. Long holidays. Talking to no one. In deadly whispers. Of how many of me there are. Now that i've learned how. To calculate forever.

Divide by zero. Ignore the logic. Of self-proclaimed good men. Try on the dress. Be pretty for only a moment. Any longer doesn't suit her. The broken ladders. The empty stairwells. That want to climb, but can't go any higher.

The bite of oblivion in her lips. The Arithmetic of having been tasted. Lose me. The time line is corrupted. Lie to me. About when. Or if it ever mattered.

The only real drug is us. The only true addiction is if.

Turn on the siren. I'm a criminal. Find me. Still trying to arrange. These stepping stones to heaven.

I could tell the world. Convince it that I'm somewhere else.. Because I am. But why push it waway when we've come so close.

To proving. This suicide is not so selfish.

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.

Liars. Bug bites. Scratching. to scold for all this missing skin.

The ladder in short poems. sad enough to ignore. So many vampires. Fangs close to the skin. Pretntious matadors tease the horns.

That was it. A series of questions. Drowned kittens spilling from dark buckets.

I meant to be kinder, but it's difficult.

I laughed at the sober as any addict would. Lovers like waterfalls. Tearing all these barrels apart.

Time comes in flinches. Punches of skin that make the heart blink. It cries that it can't see. But I know that it has always been blind.

She dresses the doll. In the remnats of old
men. She tells herself no one is looking. As she removes its head.

The poor detective between her thighs still stuck on the first clue.

Limping toward her the dog began to bark. Its collar loose. Its tail broken in several places.

Why are you here? What do you want? I'm a cat. What can I do for you, she asked. Prepared to run.

My friends are all rodents.

Injured dogs may be less dangerous, but they're still not to be trusted.

What could you want? I think I know.

I can't heal you. Nor can I make you worse. I am only a trifle of skin in claws twice the size of my own.

The bones you buried are not to be dug up.

I wish you well crippled dog. In digging up the other cats you've killed.

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.

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.

Was as right. Why ask slaves what to do with their masters?

Alone. A. Lone. No one there. Inside the sweaty cradle where the needles first painted our blood. Stoic rainbows bending hard over the spine of the sun.

All lost, owing no excuse. All found in the dead of my skin. the perpetual ignorance of hope. the stuttering fluorescence of breath. Still insisting it can escape the dungeon of my lips.

We are remembering. We are resigned.

A light out not expecting.

To ever see itself again.

This hidden eye. Peeled from my flesh. Sighted by the cut that has blinded the rest. In the perpetuity of arguments with touch. A lie neglects only everyone. A. Lone.

To me, reason finally admits not knowing. Why there must be darkness in order for light to exist.

A loud orphan.

Near Enough.

To see what was never there.

Skin like cataracts. There is only the intention of touch. We see by sound. The sound. Lips dividing like Velcro ripping apart. The scream of defeated friction. All we have left is gravity. The physics of falling.

We flirt with time. Teasing the quantum. Charming what cannot be charmed. The science of seduction lies in our misinterpretations of one another. In our willingness to ignore the facts.

I can go back. As often as I wish. Time is an external force. But there's no one there. A million moments splitting into billions of quarks. Microscopic dances of flesh drowning inside a fingertip.

We're too big. To fit inside each other.

Rogue time machines on the whims of sex. Proportioning starvation.

We're too small. Caterpillars. Cocoons not lasting. The exit only makes the hole larger.

Cactus in a big cup. The hybrid charms of long goodbyes. Evolution. In high heels. Close enough. The smell is sober. The taste is drunk. Evolution in short skirts. Gods without mouths talking to apes without ears.

Evolution. Veins bisected in drug.

People. Comments left on the skin.

Evolution in its diaper. Shitting its pants.

Screaming. Change me.

I'm wet.

Speak to me. I need to learn the language.

Evolution.

Teach me to step on angels. In high heels.

Evolution.

Pockets I never knew were there.

Until the change in them began to rattle.

The sexual pleasure of apes not withstanding. I still think I'm close.

Little men. Or big ones. I haven't a measure for such questions. Only a collection of moments. The scent of strangers like a perfume I've worn all my life.

I argue with the hour. As all women are want to do. It was no one's fault. And every one's. Red thighs rubbing together until the feeling is gone again. Bits of sleep left upon her pillow after waking up. Pieces of men in the bleach she soaks her sheets in. Pieces of shit floating to the surface of the wash.

I was trying to explain to time that it didn't understand us. We don't live in it. Just too close.

I was listening to the time expiring between us. Bleeding loud in broken sobs. Like a naked woman reading Dostoevsky for the first time. The swallow of truth in her voice as she began to speak. Of men. The ones we have. And those we let have us. The difference only a phone call. A disproportionate conversation about skirts still unworn.

The crime: just trying to decide.

The punishment: choice.

Greeting the infection in pieces of when. The tumors. People. Blind intersections. The puzzle between her legs finally making sense. Quantum physics for the common person. It was the future all along. Otherwise this couldn't have been.

No need for clowns in grave makeup to persuade the children that they can't recall. They're already frightened. No hems. The dress has always been short. She was just wearing it wrong. Touch. Like rubber bands. So eager to break just for the chance to hurt someone.

The coward is certain. He's been there. On magic carpets some call sex. Because it aches too much to have actually been.

In the past. Buried under piles of dinner plates that still wreak of flesh not tasted.

There is your past if you must have one. The faulty ledger that still insists we can afford tomorrow.

Rigid glances smear color of her kiss. Abstracted. Neglected Rapunzels let down their hair. From towers feeble with love. All stories told too many times. Victims. In billowing gowns that fit too well.

It's easier to be hurt. To be broken. She tells him. Then you know what to wait for. Otherwise we're just meat. Lingering on the bone. Mourning the skin the heat has seized.

I'm better off weak. Like all addicts are. The hook through my cheek hurts, but I'm resigned to it. I can go so far. So far.

Weak doesn't lie to me. Try to tell me I can get better. It's days. Months spent distilling the venom. Into words. Gaps in the poison. Just long enough to say I am dead.

Lost. Daring eyelashes at the bottom of the basin. Bottles. Extinguished like so many birthday candles. Wishes that don't come true. Made in the camouflage of faces we assume to recognize.

Sparse anemia's. Toy with the the cure. The basis of disease being weakness. Or otherwise the delusion of strength. From fractured hands to broken ears. The song resolves itself regardless of my involvement. I'm just there.

Lost.

Cut grass turning brown on a busy sidewalk.

Immunity arrives in parts. Jugs of sleep to drink too much of. Threats of vaccine in every lust.

Lost.

Dirty footprints stolen from the darkness. Quenches cherries still ripe enough to remember what is gone.

Pink jeans that were too tight. Barking, snarling dogs filling her bed. Pictures. Proof. She was. Is defective. Swimming in leaches. Wearing the parasites. It's a fashion statement.

I don't see what you do.

Blood lies. Pushes us apart. Pink jeans. From sears. Husky girl's size. Still too tight. Push down the pockets. Suck in her stomach. Grab the rivet with both hands. Find a way to fit.

Or be a child. Cry. Be scolded. Pick up the addiction early. Become an expert. Angry santa claus on the roof. Cookies on the ledge. Don't eat them.

It's just a trade off. One habit replaces the next. Food. Hate. Drug. Falling dominoes to stand up all over again. Little girls in fuzzy photographs. Unaware of the world. Or how much it wants of them.

Cheat sheets for daddy still don't take care of mom. She was young and unhappy then. She made me wear pink jeans that didn't fit. She wrote letter on her pillow to the men she'd lost and the children she'd aborted.

I used to try to imagine my other siblings. Or prteend they were in my place instad. The little truths of liars more than enough. Armless bartenders pouring loud beers for the deaf. It wouldn't matter. None of it is real until you're standing inside the pink jean that don't fit.

Corduroy skin shifts to change its song. Tired explainations condone wasted sobriety. Rachet it down. Wrenching the cause from the victim. Blaming them. As all forms of justice inssists. Weighing my illusions against the torn feet of discarded dolls. Measuring my worth in blow jobs. Moments wasted pleasuring others.

Little glimpses of happiness between sucking dicks. Burns resolving to new skin.

Parasites promising to swallow the infection.

Men like needles full fo vaccine. Bits of the disease to make us immune.

Penises on trial. Lonely vaginas still searching for the wizard.

Hopeless Dorothy's still clicking their heels.

The black bird in the bit stream flies closely to the conversations I always have, but never finish. Penises as spoiled tourniquets for bleeding vaginae on the verge of realizing the void is everything.

Everything is nothing. Nothing is the hour I was born in and the eternity in which I've lived. Everything. And nothing. Pale twins finishing each other's sentences in gobs of phlegm and broken condoms.

I could be the smoke. The source of the cancer that pours the tumors like rock candy into your blood. The damsel in tarnished heels counting the beats in her head as she dances. Pretending she knows the songs. Or even the reason that is exists.

Tame shotguns killing the dead in a spray of indifference. Triggers searching for a finger to liken that death to something real.

The blackbird on the telephone wire teasing the lightning.

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.

The whisper an accomplice to so many crimes. Broken briars like useless fingering trying to grab. Bits of skin still uncooked after we've left the on the heat too long.

Cold!

The dishrag in your grin makes it impossible to see. Look like I still have eyes long after I've let the vultures have my sight. Seeing isn't enough.

Burnt. Bits of caramel thoughts lost to the heart. THe sugar turned to black. Like the rush of lies to the forefront of my heart. It stops for a second to draw pictures no one will ever see.

The tragedy of humanity is that it needs us. People pretending to care.

Open lips on a kiss that isn't coming.

We're nothing. And it's terrible. Because everyone wnats to be something. We're nothing. And it feels right. What else is there for us to be?

Dark stairways travelled down in moments of weakness. Flags flown high enough that any god can see we don't know what we want.

Riding the carousel she thought the horses had the advantage. Moving so many without having taken a single step.

It always took days for her clothes to fit and by then she had to take them off. It's no fun being dirty all by yourself. It's no good being dirty if there's no one who wants to lick up the mess.

She made an omelet for herself. Out of all the foods the refrigerator had left in it. It tasted like the last time she remembered having been touched. Empty, but her still wanting more of the nothing.

She took a sharp knife and dew her pictures in the onion. A teary coloring book foul with pictures undone. She sealed the envelope and almost put the stamp on it. Letters to no one. Carousels still spinning. Long after the horses are dead.

It was easy to be her she thought as her skin fell to the floor.

I was always just pretending that I wasn't alone.