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.

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.

Cadavers on the walls. Smelling softly of desperate men. Open sores in his timelines where vagrant hours fester. Shadows on the bed. Fingers striking ambivalent keys. Her breathing. Just another songs he can't quite play.

The fat of words in her throat. Rain paused on the glass. The storm awaits her next command. The shrug of the pillow against her head. Alone at last. Nothing to spoil the villains' coup. Fallen always. Now they can see it.

Needles in her fingers. Calculate reality. In the distant hums of wagging dicks. And the stutters of broken men. She drags out the scale from between her legs. And waits for him to notice the blood.

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.

Lie, she said. You always do it. Feet. Toes. Fingers. Pretending to know what they feel. Take me back, he said. I've gone too far. The future is passed. And there is no place for me to exist. I'm dead before I was born. I could save myself, but I won't.

Guilty wagers in between. That life and this one. Seams in the teddy bear favor the stitch. But I've lost my needle. I guess it's easy to forget. But it's just as easy to remember Just look.

Seeing comes in convulsions. Seizures of touch. An ambulance of lovers. Stuck in traffic. I don't mind dying. It's the waiting to I hate.

Stroke the apple carefully. Release the poison. Convince the devil you have a plan.

I don't want anything.

That is the problem.

They have the advantage.

The funny thing is people think it matters. How well they cook. How much money they have. How pretty that once were. As if time can discern between the billions of flies constantly landing on its excrement. Or that it would want to. Or ever would try. To care about the insects that live in its shit.

If I were a nihilist I'd say that the end is near. But I'm not. So I'll just say that it's watching. Has never been very distant. And I wouldn't mind at all if it finally came.

We can buy and sell so many things. Without profiting from a single transaction. That's the paradox of being American.

Having everything.

And nothing.

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.

What I can't hear. In the pauses between the rain. Gnawing on doll's feet. Minor provisions for the blind. The deaf. The dumb. Gods in plain clothes on corners too dark to see. Their faces as they thank us.

What I can't see. Revisions. In thrusts of charcoal. Men. Layers of soot. Dirty chimney. Keeps the smoke in. Bad lies still coming back to challenge the poverty of fallen bridges.

I can't hear them, but I know what they're saying.

Forgotten dogs trying to run on three legs.

Bad dogs. Tails still wagging. Bad dogs. Little women.

Looking for old leashes.

Dead things. I know about them. The spark of streetlight just before the sun rises. The dirt from the well right before the water rushes. The pea tormenting the tired princess as she laments her lack of princes.

Dead things. Loud songs playing softly. Children pretending to be asleep when the bedroom door opens.

Drawing the pictures chases away the words. Broken bottles struggle to hold onto a dwindling illusion of escape. Dead things shift under their dirt. Sleep comes in the rapid intervals between breathing and screaming. Dead things. No one hears them when they say they are alone.

Dead things. All their open cages prevent them from being saved.

Paper planes. No breezes. I'm a fortunate zombie. The hunger still hasn't arrived. It never will if I can hurry.

Chewing gum. No teeth. The dead things count themselves while the living aren't looking. Heaven comes in strobe lights. Hell comes in footprints.

Snow. Dead on the road. It's never cold enough to hear. To ask them why they fall when there's no place left to land.

Dead things. Remembering us. Old clothes that no longer fit.

We are leaving. Headlights staring in my window. Autopsies on movement. We are leaving. We just have nowhere to go.

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.

He brought in the speakers. Inch by inch until everything sounded like she remembered. Too much treble. Too much bass. A lot of strangers paying for their highs with drunken women. Or postcards from their mother's they'd yet to read.

She turned off the amplifier and tried to listen to the nothing. Feigning deafness until they started scraping the chalkboard.

All the erasers gone they decided there was still time to lie enough. Black markers seeping through thin paper. She thought about saving what she'd written, but changed her mind when she found out the words had decided she couldn't be trusted. With all those little shoes that barely fit on the feet she'd gnarled playing so often with dolls she'd only remember by hating herself.

Taking off their clothes in tiny doses of hysteria. Sad clown smiles losing their makeup. Sirens at the back of her throat looking for someone to blame. Besides herself.

The fruit is over us. Bored.

Too cold to bleed.

The battery is dead.

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.

I went looking for lies to tell myself. The kind that distort your face with plastic wrap, but have holes enough to let you breathe. I went out wearing the roll of the dice and came home with nothing.

Little girls don't know what they want. Big one aren't sure what they can have. It's not the men. It how willing we are to be used by them if it might mean not sleeping alone.

There in her Pandora smile she let the box open. Eager for a respite from all that hope. Curious. No. She'd seen it all escape before. And come back less.

Talking to Zeus in big fairy tales. Like the bracelets she still has pictures of herself wearing. Long winters that promised to end, but never did. Confections of skin that gave us away just as we were learning how to taste their sweetness.

I'm not asking to be remembered. I just don't want to be forgotten.

The words are fickle, but what they say is consistent.

I'm talking to myself again.

Sguar pills choosing where the sickness begins.

I don't want to change my name. You do it instead. I don't want to be someone else.

The oregano scent still potent in the armpits of her fingernails. The sausage flavor on her lips far from dissipating. She cried from the onions. Tears she never knew were there. Sniffly and weak. Her sleeves pushes up paste her elbows, still falling down into the muck at her wrists.

Raw pork. Pin chicken. In heavy cuts of marinade. Like sex. Like undressing. Like tasting genitalia for the first time. The hint of piss that makes it easy to swallow dead things. Easier still to spit them out.

The evolution of sanity in burps and giggles. Insomniac princesses fretting the mattress. The apple. So sweetly poisoned. The faiarest drug is our ignorance. Mosquitoes without their wings still find a way to bite.

It's not the stinger that itches. It's the way we pull it out.

Her pussy like a tackle box. Full of hooks and lures. Determined. Precious. Devoted to the aftermath. As every stray must be if it wants to find a home.

The worms didn't seem to care that she was using them. Her past was not there during roll call. Tardy, but not truant. Making her boots from the footprints she's saved. Dirty Polaroids try to be the people she thinks she can remember. When it's dark. And the walls are doubtful. Arguing the strategies of victims with their nightgowns open. With their slippers under the bed.

Each drug making the the lost moments mine again. Naming those graves with persistent chisels. As if they were there in the stone all along. And we're digging. Scratching with broken fingernail for the names we know are in there.

The beauty of loneliness is that I don't need. Don't want anymore. Whatever it is that makes us pretend some one's still listening.

The disappointment is. There are gods for what you wish. But for what you desire there are only people.

Gravity is such a liar.

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.

If I'm different it's because everyone else is the same. Let go of the darts. The balloons will still break. No need for sex to disinfect the wound. The bacteria is bored with us.

I'm a cult. As right as I can convince you that I am. Tall fences grow from zombie soil. Short skirts tease tall boots in a circus of vagina. I'm a religion. Reason enough for the lost. Popsicle penises. Warm ice cream in a paper cup. Practicing their form from the edges of a plastic spoon.

If I knew them I don't anymore. If I ever lived it wasn't like this.

There are predators. And he imagined himself as one. Like straw houses imagine they won't be blown down.

I knew the alien. It was easier then. The tabloid of skin telling me to wait. Back when change was a luxury. And everything else could afford to wait on it.

The hideous smile in her crotch. Posing staunch for the artist in his pants. The vengeful child in her head. Rubbing the leaves into the concrete. Portraits of life drawn with the dead.

The act driven by strangers' pretty hatred. They don't sing. They blame. And accuse her. Of things too true.

When it gets dark she scolds herself in breaths of cigarette smoke. When she gets lonely she thanks her demons for their generosity.

Not here. In this graveyard we eulogize as touch. Not now. All these tears we have no explanation for except that we don't understand what it is we've lost.

I just know some thing's gone. I'm not gone from it, but it is gone from me. Jagged lipstick pouring its code upon her grin. Words like mosquito bites scratched into her face.

The itch of submission. Paints itself under her nails.

There's nothing to change except herself.

I'm talking to them. Just not in ways they can't hear. Jesus pudding is chocolate. Satan is vanilla. Love is neopolitan. Both of them and something else.

The end is caramel. Burnt sugar. Sweeter than it's ever been. I'm only condoning suicide if it's the best the solution. Like in most cases. Most people. Bipolar clown faces drawn over the actual ones.

The exaggerated outlines I call lovers turning my fear into art. A palette knife always under her tongue. Ready to caox the mountains from the flood. The canvas between her legs still as blank as the first time she opened them.

Perdition only makes sense when you believe in redemption. Otherwise it's just masturbating until it hurts.

I'm not a clown, but I know how to wear the makeup. I'm not god, but I know what he's thinking.