Liars with long yardsticks measure the truth in snickers of quarks. Lonely atoms flirting with the surface of the bomb. We woke up the devil from his nap. And now he wants a lullaby.

The square root tells us how. Work backwards from the negative. Solve for nothing. Ignore the rest. Go there. That the future yields to the whims of fickle flesh. Time only a loud heartbeat in empty hands. Life limping from fist to fist. In games of giving away what has yet to exist.

The man on his page. Stabbing hard blank sheets of paper. Ready eyes blaming the emptiness for what he cannot say.

The anomoly. Weak men. Weaker women. Blame the arithmetic. As their numbers dwindle.

So many of us. So few.

I brace myself for the algebra of his touch. A menagerie of zeros. Coo our exchange of skin. A circus of lips claim our faces. As if time still knew. The proximity of when. The nature of the if. The creaky swing. Almost near enough. To catch itself. As I become the one to find her that way.

Still the x is solved to nothing new.

The air shrugged hard. Scraping loudly over her breasts. The confection of her skin laced with sour bits. She walked. Paced. In the small span of her decision. Elastic moments snapping back. Calendars in her chest erupting with the future. Withering with the past.

Everything gone. Nothing forgotten. The air not noticing. The chisel in her head. Carving. Culling yellow from crimson. In puddles of when. Time still tasted her. She it.

Alone in herself. Alone in anyone. Close. A lie told by anxious fingers. Touch. A treason of the heart. Sex. The coma. The machine. Keeping dead things alive.

Nothing ahead. Nothing behind. Travelling outside the confines of skin. Emerging from the asshole of time. Covered in its shit.

shedding skin. layers of epidermus rationalizing the absence of skeleton. The rain so loud. As I converse with the walk. Through the dark. The crawl learning. How far it is. To knowing. Or not needing to anymore.

angels on the backs of men. saving us?

the mattress in the middle of the room demanding an explanation. as her hymen wept. red tears. do anything. i don't care what. just don't do nothing.

arranging the scabs. infections blossoming. through the soil. casual cures with faces made of men. bent daggers under her fingernails. searching for explanations. whom to want. Amongst the thunder. Long summer nights grieving loudly at the base of heaven. Gods slightly shy of saving the dead.

The funerals. Long. The euglogies. Short. The flesh adamant. To tell the story of the snake. The poison apple in us all. The beginning. And the end.

The future a cup of tea. Sweetened with when. The lemon was still sour. The future. In selfish incremements. Of skin not avoding what is to come. so sure. so confident. there is no tomorrow.

Everything is wide. Dilated and blind. Pretty lies I can believe. For now. In the flood of his flesh. I don't mind dying. Slowly.

Birthday presents left for her. Frivilous bows. And cards written in ink. The lie was just the beginning. He strangles me in tiny kisses. Until I'm not there anymore.

Little books. Tell the story of big girls. The men they've chosen. The wolf in the hallway searching for the moon just above his head. If only he could see it. Her underwear like a napkin wiping the crumbs from his lips. In broad smiles.

Loose zippers. Fumbling with dick. Seconds become years. In the scope of riches she sells herself. Love like a bright full moon opens up. To reveal what she's never seen. She finds herself in him. If only for a moment.

I can say his name, but I don't know it.

She leaves her socks on during sex. Because she has ugly toes. Because she can't explain why the beginning is so impatient.

He says she'll be happy as soon as she wants to be. And she still believes him.

After all these years.

This is how she loves him.

No one ever asks to be loved. They beg for it. In absent skirts and mediocre penises. The same way wormholes simultaneously talk to the future and the past we do. In rips and contortions of the flesh that is conditioned to move us through it.

Millions of cells. Tiny alarm clocks ringing under our clothes. Moments been. Or soon to. Good nights in tiny bottles Sips of mouthwash he called Rumplemints.

Strange nightgowns I fell asleep. Woke up undressed.

Can't go back. Paradoxes prevail. Can't go forward. Nowhere yet to go. Left with now. Sacrosanct progression. You slow the world down and you're in the future. Speed it up and the past is yours. I do it all the time, it just never sticks.

You take your pills. Learn to love again. Between episode of Star Trek. People you'll only have for a little while. Brief rifts in the space time continuum. But that doesn't matter.

Somewhere. Some place. One of you has gone back there. And knows how it feels.

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.

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.

Talk louder the mockingbird said. Your Atticus isn't very convincing. I was there. I saw everythhing, but the words are more than I can lift. We were in the attic. Scoring the last window left to break. Throwing our lives hard at absent strangers.

Groins grinning broad in permanent marker. The mockingbird's song tracing around her shifting skin. Truth taking its photographs. Destroying the negatives. The lawyer with his speech interrupted. The victim on trial yet again.

Talk louder. Let me listen. The mockingbird begged. I have nothing without the songs of others.

Like anyone, I can only give as much as I've been given.

The attic. Plastic forks weighing the meat left after all the flesh has been taken.

Plastic forks weighing nothing. Chemical burns at the beginning of every conversation. Neglected acids trying to convince us to use them.

Little band-aids taking with them so much skin.

Cartoon eyes confessing balefully. Gravity meticulously choreographing every expression on their faces. She steps on a kiss and laughs. There is no carpool lane for hurried moments. No desserts named after us.

We're just people. Meat wearing fancy undergarments. Totem poles speaking with wooden tongues. Everyone hears, they just don't know what.

Spoiled by so many lies she finally admits the truth.

The demons are canvas. And the angels acrylic. Still, life is all watercolors. Campfires hating the folk songs and ghost stories. Big feasts and only the carcass left to crave.

I can pick up the bones and make new people out of them.

In little bits of skin that nearly wore us.

Damnable. Sure. When you consider all the fat of the wing. The point of the pencil blunted by the grace of women undone enough to know they're not wanted.

I think I know why it's so hard.

Love wants proof. Photographs of smiles. Life wants trials. Witnesses that can't remember who killed who. It doesn't matter now. Everyone's dead.

The dinosaur in the window won't go extinct because we don't remember. He's gone regardless. Her pantyhose will still be wet long after you've dried her up.

She's alive. Not just a moment for you to fondle. She's close, but not close enough to know what it is that coaxes boys into men. If that ever happens.

She puts on her shortest skirt. Imaging the eyes of strangers lost inside her. The moments composed long before she's gotten there. The dirt between her toes a trophy of sorts. As she plans her next God. In balls of thread to tight to undo. In demons too similar to angels.

Spiders talked in the corners of her sobriety. Stitching together stockings. Naming the gowns after geometrics. Crickets chirped in the foreground of her eyes. Stories she was writing for selfish saturdays. Toadstools tall enough to see everything. The cure for everything she thought, too obvious. Just learn. Or pretend to have learned that it isn't over.

Earnest ghosts. In their cardboard chains. Quiz the attic on what it still holds. She fold the clothes. Assuming her underwear is willing to move. As every teddy bear will admit. If you ask it when it's drunk. That children are not to be trusted. And adults even less so.

Repairing the blanket as the pillow floods her ears. She assumes sleep is losing consciousness. She's not wrong, just misled.

Gathering the buttons from his vest. The needle short. He remembers the child who taught him how to sew himself back together. He remembers how she lied. Said she still knew his name.

The beauty of lies is that they want to save what's lost.

Like we all want to do. Given the chance.

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.

I'm ready to go. Upside down. Arguing with salamanders under her tongue about the duality of the sun. The crisp of baseball in young men. The salt of peanuts thawing her fingers.

I'm not there. In that nightmare disneyworld. Of beauties awakening. Vapid decathlon fueled by credit cards. I can't wear that. Turn that spit into sex. Like we did when we were still secure in our solitude. That it wouldn't betray us.

It's not where. Hanging pictures. Hammering nails in with our thumbs. Until all the walls are covered in our blood. Now it's home. Or something similar. If I could remember what that was.

The apostrophes hiding their fangs from a dungeon of words. Timid vampire. Feeble as they claim to be. Shadows of faces barely visible as her insides traces around them. Buckets of bait. Without a jury. Without their lawyers. Just accusations. And pleas. Random mosquito bites on her lips. While she waits on the virus.

We were selling self-esteem from the back of my mountain bike. It's just that the mountain we chose was too steep.

I had my cartoons all laid out. In wells of when. Or if. I would ever laugh at myself again. The sarcasm read what i had so far and decided to wait.

It's funny when it hurts. Those scorpions inside our shoes acting like people do. Making the venom so appealing. Making the sting into happiness.

Like I always do.

Always will.

Take off these gloves and feel the window for the first time. The glass you always thought was there.

Never was.

The world was always there.

When I dream it's like real life. Only louder and with subtitles. I always wake up in the middle only to discover I haven't. The autumn of a life. All the leaves turning pretty colors right before they die.

The handcuffs in every woman's head as she undresses in front of a man for the first time. A thief. An artist. A victim. Drawing in borrowed ink. On stolen paper. Pictures taken without permission. Waking up. To the flashes in her esophagus. The shutter of strange eyes hijacking the lines of her hips.

They all want a fresh womb to crawl inside. Be born again as someone else's child.

Drawing the mazes in matching paint on the walls.

When we dream it's the same as life. Only redder. Tying their shoes afterwards. Crippled sideways men bent over the broken dam. They walk away the same as they walked in. Only more yellow. Counting the barbs on the stingers.

I always wake up sure the monsters are real.

If I ever do wake up.

i wasn't moving, but i was. Toads in the sky. Mimicking the rain that had already fallen. The cigarette burning down like a bomb about to detonate. Fingers and toes all tangled up in deciding where to die.

He's not ugly. Just doesn't know how beautiful he is. The dinosaurs in his underwear wait for the meteor. Imagine extinction. Like we all do. When life won't listen.

Temporary tattoos. Foul dimensions cycling through what is left of us. In the dots of blood on linen napkins. Pretentious mysteries too easily solved. No evidence necessary. No victims required.

To know what is dead.

Hunting dogs and rifles too certain. Playdough blow jobs stopped before the sculpture could heal. There should be proof, but there isn't. There should be a plague, but there's just us. Seeing god in every bit of skin we think belongs to us.

When all I want to prove is that I'm immune to it.

Some time travel that only makes sense in another world. The pantomime of strangers. A lazy dance. The feedback resonating from his zipper. Cocky songs that don't seem to care how he came to learn them. A cardboard sign stuck into his underwear. No trespassing. A template. For the only sickness that could cure us.

A man. In every sense of the word.

She's red Enough now.

To let the concrete decide how hard it will be.

Taking her frailties like insulin injections. Stifling the disease to make it come back that much stronger. Eager as a tortoise. Blase as a hare. In fables she'd ostracized long ago. Critiques of weakness manufactured by a Zen of Camelots. She's as strong as she needs to be to pretend the truth is a metaphor. There's an Aesop in every orgasm. She thinks as she imagines what clothes they take off for other women.

There are so many lives she's almost lived. Like scenes cut from a movie. Scripts rewritten for happier endings. It's pastures frying under the slope of the sun. Too confident in our dependence.

Soft battles in hard wars. Big answers in little bottles.

She doesn't remember what they wore.

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.

There was a girl with skin made of glass. Anyone could see inside it. Anyone at all.

The light would shine through forming a prism inside her. Colors she couldn't name. Her clothes wearing her. In placid marathons. People. Like black under her skin. Turning her into a mirror. Nothing to see except what is there.

With heavy eyes weighted in the seduction. The thump of winter in a fading sun. Glass flesh. Coloring itself in by the light that's always searching. For confirmation of its existence.

Lazy storms forget to rain. There's never lightning anymore. Just grass. Too green to be legitimate. And people like little plastic army men. Frozen in their killing. Or their surrender.

Both.

If she lets you see all the way inside her. Broken being so much less spectacular when there are no pieces left to step on.

Consumed with the dangling participle healthy veins never wonder after.

There was a girl with skin made of glass. Everything inside could see out. Everything outside could see in.

And she had always felt sorry for those that didn't know what an easy life it could be.

Little gods dressed up in the robes of big ones. Like all the dresses she's tried on and taken off. Slow ambulances that saved her when she didn't want to be.

She sees how they remember. In dialogue balloons drawn above their heads. In frames nimble with irony. Broken cameras take pictures of the people we've never been.

The girl with glass skin still waiting for someone to see through her.

We had enormous amounts of faith. In everything we were able to prove. There are times allotted for being yourself. Until then just try to be patient. Each call is answered in the order it's received.

We'll crack like paint does when it dries too fast. Making what was ugly, uglier yet. The truth in single servings. The world squeezed out in fast food condiment packets. Onto to stale bread.

I'm Jello. I look sweet, but I'm not.

I take his temperature from the outside in. Assuming it's coldest in the middle. Time prescribes its stoic medicine. In bottles I can't open. In words I can't read. As if we shouldn't know what makes us well. Lest we find it on our own.

The enormous lives we started with shrunk down like 501's. Poured into the holes and hardened there. Until infinity finally decides we're worth a look.