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.

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.

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.

If you love me. If you ever did. I can't imagine how. Thin sticks beat the ground. The frivilous music of dead men. Their heads bigger than their hearts. Their time machines stuck on what if.

Grandma comes apart. In thin threads. Of lessons not learnned. Witches only half in the oven. This skin teeming with lessons I may never learn. Because the touch is too easy. Too seldom. Penises like darts. Aim for something too far away. From these shakey hands.

Her thighs were all subtraction. Her tits were merely remainders in the process. There was time she thought to travel both the future and the past. If she could only divide that much. Bite down on those atoms one by one. Like broken fingernails. Find the fractions.

Teach them the math of lonely men.

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.

Mars in her eyes. Distant fingers. The sun at the back of his head. Knowing everything. As a child does. Assumption and ignorance. Fire escapes not saving. Instead Letting them in.

Knowing nothing. As anyone must. The years encrypting all those lessons.

Going back. Because I can. Touch the time machine. Memory the catalyst. It's easy to find what I had wanted after the fact. Diminished patterns. Mathematics of lust. Prove to zero again.

What I wanted never attempted. What I needed only took the numbers as they stood. Divisions. Deep equators in the body. Where the hemispheres bisect. Formulas. The profound absolute that is the solution.

All valid equations.

Useless.

When attempting to count backward.

Some blind judge called then sorting all my epiphanies into the shapes of men. Smaller than I can fit inside.

Anything they haven't taught I've still managed to learn from them.

People. Lopsided mirrors. Flushing toilets. Overflowing with so much shit.

We protest the numbers, but are powerless.

I count the minutes out loud. As if someone can determine what's missing.

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.

In that abyss. The holes in her head propagating. Splinters of sound. Fidget under her skin. People. Fierce infections of touch determined to find her weakness.

She is not immune to lonely men. Nor sad men. But she often confuses them with the manipulative ones.

The canyon. The endless pit falling into my hands. Relentless downpours of nothing. Drown failing fists. Until I am incapable of holding onto anything.

Anyone.

Years later. Frozen parachutes make us fall faster. I cannot hear what you're saying. You speak too softly. And I have grown deaf from listening too hard for all the things I had hoped would be said.

She waits patiently for the parade to stop. Climbs aboard the float after all the spectators have stopped gawking.

No one knows. Or sees her there. As the hours turn dark again.

Pacing in the echoes of their footsteps. Imagining she is not alone.

Counting backwards from zero.

At twelve years old she discovered herself. In the shadow of the clothes she'd taken off. It was years still before she would find there was a whole world out there. Beside herself. Full of girls better off without their clothes and men inclined to assist.

Say what you will about the lottery, someone wins.

Sure, everyone else loses. It's like life that way.

Not that dying would be any different.

Life after all, is merely the sum of the skins we're determined to wear and those that we're willing to discard. It's easier she's found if she can forget what she wants and focus on what she can have.

Dialogues in cream cheese. Soften too slowly. Villains say they know. They do.

Maybe everything. Perhaps nothing. It's not the answer that matters. It's how she arrives at it.

The garden still grows though she's not there to water it. The sun still burns though she hasn't seen it for years. In fits of arithmetic is how he touched her. In hernias of algebra is how they made love.

Integers of flesh extrapolating the sum of paradise from dead skin.

She was twelve years old, maybe thirteen when this big world finally began to make sense. She finally learned it wasn't about what she had. All that mattered was what was absent.