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.

The dark. Science in her breathing. A catastrophe. Of men. Arranging their needles. Cures not needed. A campaign of flesh for the new disease. Little cancers on her fingertips. And the vaccines that come from knowing. Alone is not temporary.

The art of the child is that the woman never remembers how she came to know. These essentials. Of survival. The art of the child is that the colors happen slowly. So many graves to dig. Too few funerals. It wants to be saved, but I can't.

Spilling my pulse into corpses. Looking forward to being eaten by the zombies. Isn't that just like the woman. And the child. To prefer the sacrifice.

Drawing on cardboard. The poor man's epiphany. I'm here. Now what. Tearing away the color. Flesh. Like melting crayons. Reaches the edges. Eventually.

It's all filled in. Now what?

Love. Like contact lenses. Too close to the eye.

I can see everything. and nothing.

I could blame the sky, but the rain would not stop falling.

Small. Isn't that what we are?

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.

In the habit. The chug of skin that decides how alone this is. The wagging tail. The little mouse. With fingers made of lead. Trying to arrange a lifetime of vertigo.

The sad. The near enough. The poets with their leather hearts. Laughing as we ride bareback. The words that make it easy to remember. The occasions that make it impossible to forget.

I could fuck you, but then I'd have to hate you again. For reminding me I really haven't changed at all.

I would talk to the man, but the boy interferes. It seems he woke up one morning older than he ever thought he'd be. I wasn't the cure, but I seemed like good medicine.

He wanted control. Over something. Someone. But all my knobs were stuck. He couldn't turn me on.

Sad men in their nervous traditions. Lose the ghost and gain the victim. In bouts of empty attics.

The aging portrait not listening. The time machine too stubborn to persuade her.

Orange thighs. Carrots to peel. The meat. Sour choices in starvation. The knife. Dull enough. To scrape away the shadows on the walls. Paint on her lips. Turns her words into jests. Long jokes stumble over their clumsy punchlines.

We laugh.

Because it's so unamusing.

We speak because the silence is too lonely to bear.

It mattered to her. She was pressing buttons on the walls. Constructing airplanes from numbers. Dividing people into poetry. Searching for that common tear in the continuum.

Going back. Taking it with her in the forward. The key in the lock. The window in her fist. Breaking. Red blue through the glass. Gravity making art from her wounds. Locks. Tepid lips. Spilling red. Maps drawn in empty underwear. The room vomiting. Knives and fingernails. The colors of the bed.

After all the time machines have left.

Still determined to go back again.

Kill the clock.

Slip on that dirty mask. So they'll recognize me again.

Lie. Say I've always been there. Waiting for the machine to catch up to the man.

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.

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.