They make words with their mouths. I make mine with my hands. Different ways of telling the same story. All heads swivelling to follow this infinite tennis match. Of living. And dying being batted back and forth until we're too tired to try.

They listen with what they've said. Their own words their ears. Searching for a long lost twin. They count your change out in untold nightmares. Candy-coated miseries of prozac bills and married sex. Flaunting their autopsies in chatter about the weather. They talk to their lives in hushed whispers like a child nursing an imaginary friend.

You're lost when you don't know where you are. You're found when you don't know where you're going.

What's the definition of torque? I am. Filthy draperies of flesh hiding the fingerprints they've left on the window. I'm not drunk. I'm an architect. Begging the stairs to listen. I'm not alone. I'm a mother looking for the children she never had. The husbands she never married.

A house built on a cul de sac. A confession written backwards. From the last caress to the first. The shotgun choking on the bullet. The runt of the litter starved of its mother's milk.

Meant to die, but unlucky enough to have lived. Blister on the foot of life. Waiting to be broken.

I'm not a writer. Malignant gobstoppers in the swallow of my type. I'm not a poet. Frail legs straddling the fatted cock of suicide.

I'm a virgin. I'm a slut. I'm everything. I'm nothing.

I know you would give me back if you could.

If software could wonder. Be curious. It probably would be now. About the jests of malaise that leak from my fingers. In a chlorine swimming pool of depression who's farce is only exceeded by its logic. I was too old for this back when I was nineteen and clumsily tried to slit my wrists sober.

On that walk home I wondered who would see the room next. The bathtub dotted with my incompetance. My most wholesome of failures drying like a Jackson Pollock on the rose colored porcelain. On my way back through those much too safe streets I wondered how long I could wear long sleeves without arousing suspicion. Or at the very least being called on it. Turned out right up to this day no one ever asked. Why I tried. Why I let myself fail again.

You can paint the black windows white and tell yourself you can see the sun. But you'll still be cold. And outside it'll still be night.

Those veins that look so near are protected by bone and tendon. Those veins that hiss your only truth in hot neon. The closer they seem the further away they are.

Waiting for the floor to decide. Which footprints it would keep. Watching the glass turn opaque. The failed metaphors of friends looking for lovers. And alcoholics searching for the poet they used to be.

Waking up to die all over again. The arrant marathons of insomniacs. Our blisters all that's left of our pride. As we crawl. The fever just enough to keep us alive.

Turning it over to the scarecrow. The grim smile amongst all those weeds. The condom on my happiness. Drowning in people I'll never know.

It's not like I want to be the burden, but I can see myself loving it. The hierarchy of sex converted to decimal points. Like we were there when the world began. Asking all these thing of us. Like we had some role in the concept of love.

You'll say it's easy being us. And maybe you're right.

You'll say I'm only as happy as I want to be. And maybe you'd be right. Were anyone else.

The duchess cleaned the fish while the knight melted the butter. Hail to the king they hummed under their breath. Insights made of wax fucked by the flame. It's only numb because I say it is.

The bloodhound passing out the cortisone to the children in the chimney. Confessions in soot wear the bricks. In sizes too small.

The bartender pukes his way through the lap dance of listening. Emptying out their skins. The tumblers punch the bar. Pissing their second thoughts. Tiny tits in big hands. Skimpy thongs wedged up huge asses.

The dance floor humping the music in languid lurches. The foreplay of strobe lights.

The downstairs gasping from below. Of lavender candles burned down to the dish. And chunky heeled boots piercing his ears. The night purring like a cat giving birth. To doorbells unheard.

The afterward in textiles. Red. Blue. Brown. Fits of solitude like corkscrews pulling the plug from champagne bottles. We go to sleep together and wake up alone. Stale with contrition fast to the soles of our shoes. The metaphor subsides and waits for our input. While we hunt and peck our way to happiness.

The dashboard choking through the dark. Straightening slowly against the girth of the distance. All melted sugar. Hot molasses on my spoon. The tired houseflies sanity breeds when there's nothing left to want.

The snore of tomorrow explaining everything.


The afterward. In colors. In textiles. As if we knew each other.

stubborn stairs
envelop the corridor

tadpole footed frogs catching
flies with their mouths sealed

the princess in her parlor
executing the pea
the actress in the park
giving shakespeare's ghost
a blow job

as if he'll remember her
after its over.

There really isn't anything attractive about life. The carpet in four hour yawns. The weight of cold sores on rotten mattresses. The cold autopsy in each dream. Every death is a suicide if you examine it closely.

The wheeze of the walls as they try to breathe. A fairy tale for the senses. The shudder of the bed in stirs of skin. In heavy gulps like bodies do when presented with the connundrum of choice. The kind of nightmares that make me want to sleep. The doorbells in the morning that seem to know when to ring.

The peep hole in every heart. Not really showing, but trying to warn us. About the strangers we think we recognize.

In the leak of the chime like sandpaper against. In the swing of the door automonimous. Either by physics or by happenstance. I'm drawn into the opening.

More a stranger to myself than any of them.

Listening for the invitation never sent.

I imagine myself as tactful. Studious pupil of diplomacy. Fly on the wall of their hearts. Eyes divided into a hundred images of a single face. True to the algebra of the skin. Accurate in theory. False in practice.

Sowing our conversations in drama and hyperbole. I've died a thousands times just to live one day. I've loved a hundred men just to prove one could love me.

I imagine myself a beauty queen. With her breasts taped to her dress. The Vaseline on her smile. Factoring how many of them would've loved me if.

I busy myself with scooping the dead seeds out of old jack o lanterns. Leaving the costumes to the optimists.

To carry on the burden of disguise.

So the cartoon began to speak. In Arrogant hiccups. Things unsaid loping one frame at a time. Through the aristocracy of happiness shunning. The elite motherfuckers we love more than ourselves calling our bluffs. It's not unrealistic. We are. Of course it was complaining. Why would it say anything otherwise. Thick with ointment. To smother the sting. The sad parole of lives from one prison into the next.

The rag dolls in the the crease of the pillow. Counting the belt loops in his jeans. The snake of his fingers as they poison her with pleasure. The bite of the horsefly. The crimson of the summer. Like so many men pretend to know.

The overdose in her nightgown. The only bit of her he had left to love.

It was so loud. An airplane taking off inside my head. Men. Women. Children. Poverty in every bite of chicken salad. A concentration camp of an eatery. Throngs of people. Old and young trucked in from every corner of the county. To pay twenty dollars for soup and a sandwich. Twenty dollars to scream your choice of bread at the girl behind the counter. Twenty dollars to carry your tray to the last empty table and chew until the hunger subsided.

Getting up to refill my waxy cup of soda it seemed fitting to be stranded in the middle of the world. Surrounded by people. Fouled by the engorged cancer of humanity. If this was anyone's hell, it had to be mine.

Twenty dollars to ponder why I ever left the house. It's a bargain. To sit over my chicken salad and gloat about the futures of their children. To be so sure they're wrong.

All the cities I've been to have never been so loud as this. Surround sound chaos. The symphony of the scraping chairs. As old women straighten to leave. The scrape of forks through dwindling salads as young ladies disembark from their laptops. All the sandwiches I've eaten never as satisfying. Twenty dollars. For chicken salad and to be glad I wasn't chosen.

The tedium of life endlessly chasing itself. Frantic christmas lights someone forgot to disconnect.

I fiddled with centering the bed. Like a new mother fusses with the blankets on her infant. Like an astronomer plays with the stars he imagines to be his. Skipping rope at every favor. Childhood rhymes purchasing our futures on credit.

Wiping the mirror. Cleaning the entire room with store brand Windex. Fragrant bursts of ammonia kissing my boredom. With a nausea so delightful only a poet could love it. The fallacy of living.

The drug. Sound in its dogma. The proverbial stitches. Coming undone. All the gods of the Greeks. Of the Romans. All gone. Relegated to myth.

All the gods of every empire proven false once history is written. Every god except addiction.

It's only easy when it's hard he said. Thick puddles of suspicion thundering like concrete thickening. In fragile tsunamis made of trust. You can hear them hardening if you listen close. A stampede of messiahs each as mortal as the one before.

Frozen eyes unable to blink. Stale headlights throbbing in the dusk of the televison.
Seeing highways where there were only parking lots.

If the answer isn't to be found in another cigarette then I am never to find it.

Eight. Nine. Ten.

Counting the hairs on my leg. Stopping at one thousand and one. Just because its close enough to zero. The abstract of a yellow light cautioning in the distance. Like the wink of a great monster with secrets to tell.

In statues made of skin. With eyes too big. We waited for the artist to return. To fondle these shapes. Manipulate the strict geometry of reason. As we had tried to do and failed. As we had imagined everyone must have done.

The child spoiled by the epiphany. The pavement scored by the sun.

I think I've woken up alone. But the sheets say different.

Take the elevator. I'll meet you there. Take the last of the daylight. I don't want to see.

Eight. Nine. Ten.

The dummy's in the courtyard. Swollen in his stance. Consoling the living with paper ladders. I'm high, but never high enough. To break the glass.