I'm gone. Away from myself. The homily of casual sex resounding. Thudding. Pounding. Like club music to the seizures of bad dancers. In stutters of strobe light across frantic patches of skin. A maze of bee stings and ointment that turn all these scars to puddles of mud.

If only I were as weak as I accuse myself of being. I could gather those lies like people into a big auditorium. And they'd assume anything I said was true. I could make their lives better. Or worse.

Depending on my mood.

I could make pictures instead of just drawing them. And sleep without having to dream at all. And the future would give us gentle encouragement as we learned to walk.

again.

It's just your average bible story of resurrection minus a few gods.

Telling the stories to the keyboard. In brief orgasms of inspiration. The sparse pulse of fireflies in the cough of the waning sun. Small lies to build a larger truth. Empty chalkboards still dressed in the ghosts of expired lessons. The stubborn geometry of expectations. Did it hurt enough. To change me? So that the next time I'll know better than to wait.

For it to come to me.

Will I wake up beside myself in a sweat of surrender. Or will I sleep in tiny victories.

Knowing we were never really there.

Little bits of time travel in every lover.

I lose my place. The outlines take over. One drop too much is all it takes. To turn that glass into a grave. One color shy of a rainbow. In the stare I can still remember. That studied me like some sad microscope. Searching for evidence of hope in the casualties of its gesture.

Without a war. Without a cause. Love filters through us. A weak poison. As pedestrian as life is. Wet sidewalks in every gaze sheepishly conforming to the march of happiness across our skin.

The future is all duct tape and tears. Strangers clothes were wore because it hurt enough to change. Fabric and glue deciding for us how hard it'll be. Holding together what's falling apart. Convincing lives to collide. Cracking hearts like eggs.

The future isn't ahead of us. It's right there. In every bite of flesh that convinces us we're still hungry.. Not because it has anything to offer. But because tomorrow looks so much like yesterday did.

When you're yourself this long. When you've been with every kind of man. It's not hard to know what the antidote is.

The only wisdom in this kind of learning is regret.

Wolves in the courtyard. The smug grin of hungry beasts. Like the attitude of forgiveness all lives scar. The stick of needles drugged with false cures for imaginary diseases. The crying clown. With its white tears. The orgasms of gods to entertained to care.

In the short hairs. In the tragedies we call lives. Every face a poison that's taste is worth dying to know. In years thick with the briefest of heavens. I'm still an atheist. Ready to face the nothing that comes after.

Dying is birth. Pain is happiness. And goodbye is forever.

Sorting through that grim fairy tale. Death is a only technicality. Hell is wondering what they meant. Did they say it because you wanted to hear it. Or was it really how they felt.

In the summer we wait for the winter. In the winter we long for the heat. In love we sink ourselves. Fleshy, heavy anchors into a chaotic ocean of people. As if there is a bottom. Something below the surface to keep us together.

Have you ever seen the fat hookers in Amsterdam pitching out their buckets of cum? Have you ever wondered if sex was the closest you'd ever get to god?

in the way we see everything
steeped in our losses
sour with days we'd
thought forgotten
and so unusually romantic
as is every broken heart

the night makes promises
the morning never keeps
under rumpled sheets
between tried bodies
quiet sobs search the
silence for moments
that were missed

in fits of futility
as soiled as pleasure
sorrow becomes vision
and we can see in the darkness
obsessed with a future
we can only see through
hope's too perfect
binoculars

scribbling on the shadows
in palettes of sweat
colors she imagines
when none are present

eyes wide open
to see the nothingness
between her legs

not a word to say
or fool to write of
now that she can see
what never was

Coaxing the world into your fantasy with a heavy rub. Masturbating on the frailty. Of hands about to collapse. The pale they wrote on their crutches. The dark of dead limbs moving through fallen clothes. In a headache of kisses.

The pneumonia of pleasure. Making it hard to breathe. Making them our only medicine. But the sickness become me. And I learn to love how harsh it is. The sickness croaks out its winner in a slot machine of sex.

And I'd spend a thousand people to win just one.

The treble of silence. As assuming as a peacock's tail. Of my desire to be relieved of myself. In habits bigger than I am. While we wait. The verses of tired ovaries. Whisper against the sheets. Of lives that will never be. The red sex we almost had. The spill of my sanity from this drink. Releasing my skin from it prison of memory.

The callous needlepoint of memory. In pleasant stitches. Too accurate. The devils. In their horns. Broadway in a bucket. Shovel and pail castle enough. The grandmother in the rocking chair. The tug of the radio at her bosom. While the words decide what they'll mean. While the sentences crash like waves into what's left of us.

The liars... they're the only ones you can trust. Wearing you life in occasions. Fragile gardens coming into bloom. Like skin preparing to open. Swallow us.

They'll say it's over. And yes, it is. But you won't miss them. Just how easy they made it to hate yourself.

I don't sleep anymore. I just lie down and arise later unaware of what transpired between then and now. The pretty peacocks self-destruction flaunts in therapies of bad behavior.

Humility bites its lip. To be fetching. As all girls are oblidged to do. Stick out their legs so that someone will stumble. Inventory the males and decide which ones to keep.

The flattened parachutes of lovers fallen. Little toll booths along the highway of the heart. Checking to see how lost we are.

But I was different because I wanted to be lost. Always did. For them to look and not be able to find me. For them to feel just once like I do all the time.

Where all the words disappear like snowflakes melting. Where every storm is a blizzard that makes it easier to see. How far I could've fallen. How little I actually did.

Because the world is full of unhappy people. And I'm just one of them.

Those puddles at your feet, look closer, they're probably someone you thought you could love.

If we were only this. Just a maze of veins. To be solved. A chalkboard of skin. To write upon. And be erased without consequence. Then i could understand. Why the hurt grows so big only to shrink back down into nothing.

We are true or false questions. The vague geometry of loneliness tutoring the soft angles in the heart. We are god. Responsible for the happiness of everyone around us. We are the Satan's who take the blame for all their misfortunes.

If we were only what we wanted to be I'd be nothing. But we're still. Always have been what they want from us.

Discarded apple cores envious of the pie in the oven. Pillows with names I can't recall. Hairs on the sheets that still wreak of all the men who made me glad to be a whore.

That overlooked bastard child of love and sex that makes it almost possible to love yourself again.

Each life is its own crippled avalanche. Each life has a pedestal. A place for the things it can't have. Some are stable. While others need to fall.

An avalanche of flesh. Slinkies down her throat. Rubber balls under her dress. The rain on the window. Her sadness in syndication. More valuable with every frown. A comic book of sorrow. Memory in pages. In dark ink outlines.

Still waiting.

To be colored in.

A subdued thunderstorm. An empty bed. Doll's eyelashes caught between a blink and a stare. The sky tumbles down in floods. The sheets draw their sketches. In shades of touch. Lost to the abyss of each other. We paint the doors so red. We count the steps on the porch. Sold to the feeble arithmetic of lovers.

Continents of skin still defying oceans of experience.

The truth in pin pricks. My needle. In your haystack. Searching for itself.

He gloated in the rhyme of indecision. Buoyed by the paranoia of sex. He took off the glove and wore her closer. In hurried jabs. In a fragile vase of utopia that was broken before he let it go. The prison of happiness coming into focus one fuck at a time.

The arithmetic of love calculating our parts. In numbers too small. In fractions of skin. To decimals too precise. To lies we never had the chance to tell. The numb of the future. Needles stabbing their pictures into empty eyes.

The pull of the past. Like a run in your stockings. The sour of the future. Like some phantom pregnancy. Bloated with all the things you thought you wanted.

Calm because you know the abortion is coming.

The little fish in a big net. The little fish biting down on the big hook. The little fish in the big ocean.

Batman was in the oven. Robin the microwave. Spoiled like the beer skins we discover on the surface of the bottles after a long night of being ourselves.

The anatomy of loneliness drawn in stretch marks on the glass. Sober little smiles flaunting the comedy of addiction. A thousand summers in my palm. Writing the future. In crochets of skin. A thousand more winters in my pocket. A warrior and a cripple. The crime of epiphany. Singing. Loose change. A coin toss of decisions. A chess board in our thoughts. A bishop in your stare. A pawn in your finger.

I always intended to lose. I just never meant for it to be so obvious.

A million little locks in my skin suddenly opening. With just one key.