The song. Deafness in long cautions. Always have been. Misled. Thinking the sound was enough. Slanted walls. Ceiling pretending to be floor. The joke. The threat of fingers too close to the truth. Falling forward. Into when. I can only claim to remember having been someone. Turning off the alarm. In a slow dance. Between blindness and waking up. This void. The only bridge. Always open. Go through. Not over.

Looking up at falling. The hours talk loudly. In metaphors. The mountains are small. The molehills giant. The minutes an aperture. A lens taking pictures in black and white. Of all the colors I still want.

The thief in her underwear. Takes nothing she hasn't already lost. The ransom in her heart. Remains ignored.

Old movies. Grainy orgasms in fraying nightgowns. It was night. But it wasn't dark. There were moments. Gobs of spit on the tip of her tongue. She would mistake for opinions. Angry memories. Neglected whores. Finding their pimps. In the people who love them. Dead batteries. Marathons of. Pressing the numbers. Watching the movies.

As if, there were more than one.

Big dicks in little holes.

The whore is choice.

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?

Carve the hole. Deep enough. A renaissance of touch. In practical liaisons. Remember. Forget. I don't care who you are after we're over. It's only circumstance. The dollhouse Trying so hard to look like the real thing.

I don't care who I was then. Or who I'll be after. I am. Now. Whatever this might be. Candy house in the woods. Falling down. The abandoned misled by the sweet.

Blood like umbrellas. When it's not raining Men like elevators. Navigating skyscrapers of skin. I lose them, in the afterward. The pale telepathy of the testosterone. Wanting so much. And so little.

Every thing's the same.

Nothing is.

Find the hole. Lie to it.

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.

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.

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.

The color of finger tips was quite pink when she reached out to grab the last brick in the little pig's fallen house. The wolf she whispered to herself is not deterred by mortar. Nor defeated by logic.

I don't remember who I had been. Before the moon fell from the sky and the whole of the earth became silent. I can't recall if there was, infact, a life before this. Or whether I would want it back given the choice.

The picinic basket lays still in her fist. Her red hood spoiling the smirk of death. The wolf leans in close. Big teeth showing through the beds he's worn. She pretends she is already dead.

So long that she thinks she is.

She loves each and every one of them. Slowly building her time machine from pieces of skin. The future makes her ill. With lives she not yet lived. The past shouts. But she can hardly hear it.

All this time travel is deafening.

All this counting is endless. Looking for broken needles. Courting dying gods at the bottom of tall glasses.

Two drinks. Maybe three below the skin. A little girl tries on her dress.

Four drinks. Maybe five later she finds the mirror in the drug. Bits of her mind gang raping the shell. It's only an appetite for hunger. Never meant to be fed. We're supposed to keep wanting.

Life is a porno. Greed unrelenting. No one's exploited and everyone is. Love is a script. Poorly written. For awful actors.

Two sips. Maybe ten later I ask myself what I've said that is unscripted. Nothing really. Other than hello.

I can feel them. In dense blusters of human wind. Shy breezes that come off from the underside of young trees infatuated by the frantic. Capsules in pendulum carefully clock the hours between if and when.

Two drinks after. Perhaps four. I know who I am. Who I tried to be, but never was.

Little butterflies on the tips of branches. Trying not to sneeze.

It is a science. The lost that finds us in this search for nothing. It can be measured if I stay awake long enough. To see her. Question. How many drinks it takes.

To know it's hopeless.

All the sparkle. All the shimmer of fresh ghosts haunting her skin. The bleat of crowded disco techs extruded in a frenzy of faulty morals. The road map of his dick. Again pointing me in the wrong direction.

It's a profoundly ugly destination.

All this going nowhere.

The man waiting for the elevator fascinated her. A stolen souvenir of humanity in a marathon of machines. Tired of running and never much good at it, she decided to forfeit the prize.

She was glad she did.

The eclipse took place just as it should. Skeptical lovers turning envelopes inside out. Looking for proof of something for which there can be no evidence. Satyrs in their bubble baths advancing their pawns nearer to the back of the board. Conversations like taffy stretched too far. And stuck to my teeth.

The road was humble. The lies arrogant. As he steered her away from the oncoming traffic. Eager for the collision she lamented his decision to save her from herself. Who was he to do such a thing?

Just a man like any other. Just a penis on a Popsicle stick called intellect. Just some hard caramel in a wrapper I never should've undone.

Bedtime stories for the rest of us.

My conversation with the onion was just getting interesting when the garlic interrupted with some schematics for its time machine. It said something about global warming, straightened its leg warmers and blamed madonna before it disappeared into someplace I had already been.

I kept cutting. I had a tuna sandwich echo repeating in my belly.

I was surprised when the garlic returned only moments later with a feathered haircut and wearing acid washed jeans. It said it had been there. Back to the eighties. Cold war. Gorbechov. Nancy. And the slutty virgin. It laughed. You think I stink?

And then it zipped off to the future. Warning me not to visit. If I can help it.

The onion didn't care at all. And I wouldn't have either if my garlic wasn't gone.

Everything leaves. Somethings do it better.

Loose skin looking for drawstrings in the moment. Zippers in the smile that means nothing. Escaped prisoners in a long occupation of liars and sex. Found attics in a failing war. Salvation comes not upon being rescued, but accepting that you won't be. Some soldiers have guns, others only experience.

Browsing fault lines. Catalogs of men erupting. Chemical fires doused in blood. Until everything has fallen. And the pantyhose are all that's left of her flesh. Friendly enemies turn her surrender into triumph. She waits for the burns to heal. A puzzle of skin now, she waits to be solved.

Hooks in the meat as the knives carve the cow. All eyes discarded. Chains pull the the skin from the carcass. People dissect the shit from the meat.

Bad air fresheners and thin masks separate us from the things inside us. So many dead animals try to teach us to live.

The nightmare was in the doorway. Sereptitiously taking its clothes off. Skin broken into syllables. Chunks of breath too small to hold all we'd said. The fingerprint was on the doorbell. Songs I so seldom hear. He took off his tie and hung himself with it. It was only then that I finally noticed the knot was wrong.

She was gathering her barbie dolls into factions. Keep and discard. More concerned with the war than its outcome. Fighting she presumed for reasons beyond her. The choke hold of high heels rewriting the heart. Into something contagious. Convincing the moment that all those fragments had once been whole.

I'm not hearing the words.

When they tell me it's hopeless I only hear ropes. Gods in gym class. Cruel teachers. The ceiling so far away. Lost faces like phosphorus and calcium. Make everything harder.

White paper drowning in ink. Broken closet doors negotiating with familiar demons. Skeletons slipping into tuxedoes of skin. What was mine. Flesh has all kinds of reasons. I'm just not one of them.

Ill with determination she scribbled the disease in chunks of vein. Tort lips arguing with gravity again. Pieces of train track lost in finding where they've never been. The piano on his hip laughing c chords in unison with faulty wisdoms about what I should want.

I don't want anything.

The smoke spills from her nose and she imagines herself a dragon. The fire in her throat real at last. The long stairways taking her somewhere else. Anywhere.

I don't go there.

It comes to me. In spasms. Baby birds thrown from the nest too soon. Bland wings and dull beaks hungry for more throw up. The lawsuit of want accusing victims. Letting the monster go.

We need the monsters. To make us ourselves. To knit these all too patient skins. That let us try them on even when they could never hope to fit.

Wearing myself in sips of coffee too hot to swallow. Liars in worn overalls cultivate the reasons.

I don't know how hard it is. I only know it's far away.

Dirty fudgesicles make this coldness a religion. Arrows at the back of her throat point in every direction. He could've saved me. Had he only saved himself first.

Not that I needed to be saved.

Or wanted to.

I could stand up every domino and still not be dsiappointed when they fall.

Ice cubes melting.

Just like we do.

Her tits were soft cooked eggs. Her eyes were sausages. Trays of skin. Stacked. Plates breaking. In accusations of skin. Dirty enough. Don't you think? Cans of bacon grease on the counter. Pretending she was there. In theory. Or practice. Or anything she could call constant.

Little gods on their totems. Drawing the dot. In puddles of meat. All the dead things that make us alive. Empty pens like Used condoms on the carpet as the words fail her. Little women. Littler men. The abstract. The conditions of seldom like paper cuts.

Open. Unbleeding skin. In need of nothing but time to fuse it back together.

She said she was over it and started counting the days until forver. Like any one hurt must do if time is to be their compass. She started walking away from where she had begun. Trusting the advice of broken men. Because who knows better what not to love?

Red riding hood tells the wolf to wait for her, but she won't be eaten by him.

I'm not your manic depressive Jesus. I'm not the pawn that takes the queen. I lose. Because I want to. Save yourself.

I'm not asking to be loved. I can do that on my own. Drawing on the sidewalk in bits of little girl. Like real artists do. Scooping the skin from hollow dresses. Naming the broken bones after arguments I've lost to myself.

He once told me there was no one he could love. I didn't believe him.

He just didn't want to.

All those doses. Take me back to when. Sober was all the time travel necessary to prove we were in love.

When you fuck a married man you find out how easy it is to lie to yourself. How easy. How awkward. How hard. It is. To believe anything they've told you.

How many ghosts you've soiled trying on the wrong skins.

Humiliated by the feast the wolf retreats. Amber paw prints slice through the glass between starvation and pride. Beads of moonlight like scurrying ants steal for themselves what we were too proud to eat.

We think we still have the cotillion. The belaboured gowns wasted on one night of thoughtless favor. Giving what can't be given back. Reaping girls into women with blunt machetes. Finding their future in fallen fruit.

Riding the frogs in stiff stirrups. Her hips artichokes. Waiting to be peeled. Her breasts homemade meatloaves. Naked without their mashed potatoes.

Her Ass in the clouds. Her head in their crotches.

Ready to swallow.

All fairy tales preempted. All pieces of glass stubbornly hanging onto the window.

More lard on the inferno. To caramelize the myopia. More mints on the pillow. To show how blind I am.

We were leaving. In little gulps. A rooster in the middle of every nap. We were leaving together. Going somewhere alone. In little sips of big drinks. In nervous parades of skin we marched with gummy bear toes. With saltwater taffy shin. I waited for the first bite of too far. Prepared to limp the rest of the way. The long stretch of clarity that these thick, sweet lies thin. Sticky moats of obsession still my size. Ready to be tried on.

Worn stuffed animals dilineate soft margins. Smiles sewn in to still faces. Unblinking eyes turn worry to pills. I take them each in varied succession. Sex a calm vaccine against love Painted plastic eyes. Sewn lips. Frozen finger and toes. The dolls try to speak of their paralysis. How unfortunate they're unable.

He used to send me living flowers. Now they're all dead.

So many colors that never bred.

Free enough. Even if we're only free to falter. There are many women who will love a man simply because he loves her. But not many men willing to do the same. There are perpendiculars. The awkward angles of memory. Falling into their slots. Obscene jigsaws solving us. In percussions of flesh. And bits of underwear still to wash.

Some pale orchestra whispering loudly senile symphonys. Too forgoetful to name why it still hurts. Too medicated to prove anything is real. A braid in her hair. Long, narrow and reticent. The spice of dying in every meal we share. Dirty trenchcoats cloak the detective. As he wanders the miles between the clues. Performing his deductions in heavy breaths. Doing his arithmetic with trembling legs.

Waiting for the murder to be ready. Waiting on the victim to lean into. The soft leather jackets that separate criminals from artists.