The man was picking at the lock. Searching for the key she'd swallowed. The mud in her underwear. Smudges of cunt fracturing eager kings. Short dialogues on why it's over.

Wake up dear, he whispered. In cold ions. Trips of hydrogren too far from the clock. Long shadows trace the journey not taken. Time takes. Doesn't give. The future finds us. In hiccups of then.

Time, she giggled. It doesn't listen.

My love, he said. When you're ready to hear I will tell you. All the things I've never said.

That's a beautiful promise. Still I've heard it before. Too often.

Stumbling strangers. Convinced they know. Where I have been.

Tucking into the time machine. Pirates. Cheated by their treasures.

The zoom on the lens. Touch. The catalyst. Fermenting. In docile ignorance. Love is arbitrary. Poker hands. Betting on the dealer's threats.

I don't think I have ever been. Close enough to heaven. To know whether or not it might exist. The ratchet clicks. Deviations. The future pretends to know who we are becoming.

The fairy tale between her legs tells of princes. But her underwear tells of plain men. Teasing swords too dense to pick up. The cavern opens to low moons and thick forest. She says.

That's the way it is.

Love comes with a stopwatch. I run too slowly.

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.

Hearing only half of everything that was said made her consider that everything is not always there. It must be noticed. Nothing can be proven. Our reality is merely the humble malfunctions of infinitely intersecting perceptions. Even so. It is all we have. All that we are.

A nightmare preserved in the sweat stains on a girl's pillow. Waking up is only a contradiciton. Hope spoiling quietly in the hardening crust on discarded latex. Touch is only a means to an end I don't want. The child is incredulous. The woman is deaf.

She sleeps. She dreams. Both light and dark. She sleeps. She wakes. There is no world. Only the difference. Between now and then. Everything is loud. Everything is quiet.

She counts backwards from zero. Assuming she will find the beginning. And finally understand which lies are worth telling.

The dust on the letters filling the air as she tries to determine. What it is she knows. And what she only thinks she does.

It's always cruel to tell the truth. There are no exceptions.

It was in yesterday that tomorrow became clear. Fundamental ghosts. The attic unprepared for their visit. The election. Time campaigning hard. To move me. The bridge. Frozen in the open positions. All ships able to pass through. No one. Nothing. Capable of crossing it.

I had apples in my basket. Trees I could recall looming in the shade of. Still young enough to assume the fruit would always fall.

Skin. Depth. Long streaks of comic book. Sheets drying in the wind. Thougthless. The clean stolen from them.

The words on the small of her wrist. Minutes counting to nowhere. Nothing. The world. In hungry slurps. Drinking us in. As we were only water. To quench. Its endless thirst.

For people. Excuses. That it should still be here. After all these years of having disappointed us.

Time stops every now and then. No one notices. The skins the world has shed. Or the people who are counting the minutes until it starts again.

Flesh. Calm matador of when. Urge the bull to rush.

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.

His words. Mosquito bites. My itch. Too deep to scratch. The virus in our skin. Infecting all our other parts. Touch. The contagion. That's killing everything.

His words. The cemetery. My eulogy. Alive in my coffin. Dead in my flesh. The clown nose in his face. The suspenders in his breath. I close my eyes and go there. I've never been anywhere else.

I stab the picture. Mosquito bites. Lingering itches.

I scratch. Until no skin is left.

The plan in his back pocket. The contingency bored with him.

What will we do now that itch has subsided.

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.

Pretty mini skirted futures. Chasing Fibonacci. Fawns in the grass. Zippers on the past. Biting down on when. I can add. It's in the subtraction where I fail.

Circles. The spiral in his pants. Add my before to his next. Every step forward is the sum of the falls that preceeded it. Taking it closer. The dandelion in the grass. Consulting with the worm. On where to invade next. The man. The anvil in his underwear. Gravity like any predator. Singles out the weakest.

Everyone eats a lot of shit. Some of us just swallow louder.

I was there. I was then. How. When. And if. I was all of the potential and none of the the ambition. I was everything they wanted and nothing that they could love. Child. Woman. Pussy. Irrelevant.

Just keep counting. It's only numbers. A series of sums. fingers multiplying loose skin. Touch determining gravity makes sense. Falling. Eyes like a coin tossed. Either side could win.

Arguing with the ceiling. Convinced that its calculations are wrong. Now that I know how to count how far away the world is.

It will rain again.

Let me sleep. I don't want to wake up. Knowing what I knew then.

Pretend you can hear her. Nod in sync with the motion of her lips. The impetuous freight she calls words will have to be orgasm enough. For now. Or until then.

Catch the stop signs in her glances. Subtle monsters put on their mittens before pointing her in the right direction.

I think I was always ugly. Just not in the ways I used to think I was. Shoot the lion. Save the cub. There was always a solution. It's just all I could see was the problem.

Skin like battery terminals. Press them to that node. Wake the electric. Set your time machines to auto pilot. Count the persons you almost were.

Follow them. Until you're certain you've been all of those people they say are you.

Escape your skin as you would any Alcatraz. Through the biggest shit holes.

Fragile masks embark upon her face. In nervous sprints. In calm marathons. The decapitated devil collects his horns. Grinning all the while. The child chases her nightmare too long after waking. It's the weakness of touch to want more. It's the wisdom of skin wait for it to come to us.

The clown. The ghost. The skeleton. Characters in a satire called the self. Laughing at everything. Disappearing too soon. Emerging from moist grave desperate for fresh skin.

The porcupine in her eye beginning to make sense. As all those needles found their target.

Seeing she soon discovered was merely a consequence of blindness.

Corpulent cockroaches in the corners of her breath. All her poisons only make them stronger.

Shit-faced gods drink the urine. Old men pissing themselves and fetuses miscarried. Dead mothers cradle cracking dolls. Inhaling life in the failed nature of trust. Science never planned far enough ahead to account for so much loneliness.

She argues with the darkness as she would anyone so stubborn as to think that she isn't aware of everyone. People. Needles. Their threads swimming through her gaping wrists. In a relentless quest to keep alive what has always been dead.

It's all tomorrow. It's all so yesterday.

The ceremony of life too much like a funeral she says.

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.

Maybe next time, she wheezed. As the cum erupted between her legs. All the sounds in her head. Vomiting at once. After a long frat party of men.

It's their cures I find offensive. Seducing the diseases. The banalities of profit. We are cartoons. Their anvils falling on us. We are pop up story books. Grim fairy tales saving ungrateful princesses.

Overwhelmed by the option of giving up. Dormant volcanoes. Their fingers hot with lava. Searching for willing asses.

We weren't even close. To where I thought I wanted to be. The backdoor. Broken bra straps. Calculating. How far we've travelled. How distant it still is.

Just Einstein. A Little bit of Asimov.

The science of thoughts. The robotics of love. As we work ourselves into the puzzle. Brief seizures of touch mislead the enthusiastic. Dying every night only to be born all over again.

I'm not trying to find. Only attempting to prove that it ever was. A few moments here. A few more there. And I am soon enough.

To know I was easy to forget. Pretty child spit out from the throes of choking gods. Swallowed up in the abortions of devils.

Fugues of skin vie to protect the tumor. Lumps at the base of her skull waiting for villains in short supply. Death ignores her. Much the same as life does.

It's strange how that happens.

So often.

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.

Remembering dead volcanoes. The rain on the glass not deciding which image was real. She threw all her photographs away. To begin again. With nothing.

It's the best way to start. The only way to end.

Seldom as we are. Perfect theorum in the calculations of Pythagarus. The geometry of touch yielding to the formula of division.

Even those small clouds can make it rain. Even little claws are able to draw blood.

Dead volcanoes erupting with pieces of skin. Empty becomes her.

Still the kitten is not to blame. For the scrathes on his face.

And dying is not a disappointment.

Years she said. With Vaseline in her eyes. Cloudy and slick with a devastating permanence. Dimes in the washer waiting to be found. Ten more wishes I'll never get to make. Clothes on the floor looking too much like I'm still in them. Breathing in the stabs of moonlight that slither through vinyl and glass bars.

Moments that strut out the front door only to later sneak in the back. Shame. Ringing dead doorbells and listening to dial tones. The weak songs that put me to sleep when drugs disappoint. As they often will.

Just like people. Only more loyal. More human.

A lifetime. Several I think. And still trying to understand. Anything at all.

Evil? Of course. Good? Just as much so. Shit in the snow. Almost too much contrast. To see which is which.

Shaky hands open the door. Close the window. It's cold outside. It's hot within. Leaning close. For the first taste. A negative slowly developing upon her lips.

Then becomes forever. Now becomes if.

Photographs of faces. Calm tragedies occur in silence. Heard only by the deaf. The words spew in shattered ricochets of tongue. Nervous. Putty cheeks offer truth as their only confession. Ignoring every wish. She bites down.

Destroying the fountain.

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.

Lanterns. Burning light. Trapped in glass. Saying we were sorry to the cards. As they careened across the carpet. Deals we made long ago. Asthma of the cunt. Suffocating tired tongues. Speeches. Rafts. Going over the falls. In barrels made of skin.

Seldom is the beginning. Too often is the end.

Madness is living just to live. Genius is knowing when to die.

The sewer in his kiss. Searching for synonyms. The cradle sleeping around us as we jostle it into submission. The tattletale of touch in each press on the bed springs. The ache. Leaden genitals tearing away from useless bodies. Our endeavours as useless as our expectations.

The atoms on his tongue. Splitting wildly. The measure of his manhood. in the shallow of my pain. The vague of the bomb catching up to us.

Everything was gone. Nothing had changed.

I wasn't even close.

No more. antidotes. The lure of the sickness prevails. Dirty clowns smearing their faces. Caught crying again. Nothing to want. Like that. The calm abyss of failing. To be loved.

The artists in our skin carving out the touch. In nervous chisels of the stone. That conceal us. The kill. Words bite enough to suffocate. I wanted to die anyway. I just never expected it would take this long.

Needles in the heart gathered the drug. Extracting. Not giving at all. All this high in my head lasts longer than it should. Broken ladders to climb again and again. Slowly ascending to where i've fallen.

It wants to be death, but it never is. THe wake of stranger's skin contemplating what it will take. Tiny earthquakes of men destroying everything.

I can't remember the last time that it mattered. but I know it still rememebers me. I hear it. Practicing the lies I once worshipped.

I pity all those moments. Forced to explain theemlves to people that can't understand.

The scales that weigh us agaunst the inertia of convenient explanations.