Standing directly under the moon. Wearing the bed with a vigilant ease. She drew circles with her fingers. On the canvas of his silence. Too close she whispered to herself. Too dark perhaps. Weathered the debate in her head. As they outlines quickly came and went in a quiet storm.

No faces. TO embrace in the pillow of touch. No silhouettes. To rape in the savage of lust. Just gauged pages. Scarred with invisible ink. And the gnarled pencils that make their graves beneath.

I could wear this nothing for as long as it takes. The perpetual windows that endlessly thrill to the outside. Out there. Where everything is different. The glowing buttons. That always promise a different picture.

The stoic glass that stands there. Between. Her worlds. Underwear at its feet. Deciding what she'll see.

She always assumes it's not listening.

The Voltaire's and the Homer's pluck on their infernos. She counts the rings. The math stutters. A light coming on slowly. Insignificant shadows in its wake. Disappearing.

You can't rush the illusion that is sleep. Random needles poorly stitching broken seams.

She was conversing with the alien. In dribbles of calculus. Fragments in the continuum colliding with the present. Drawing the stairs. In thirty six degrees. The amphibian. Solving the salt in its lungs. After the race is lost.

She tried on every gown. And each sparkling necklace. She fell asleep wearing them. Only to wake up naked.

You can. You really can. Draw pictures on the sun. If you're willing to go blind.

You can You can. Really work the time machine. If you press enough buttons.

The patron and the poverty of skin. Disrupts my assassins. Thumbing through the hollow photographs. This flesh has developed. The pictures behind broken glass. Tell a different story. Than the lens that first mistook. Apathy for freedom.

It woke me up too early one morning. The dissonance of retrospect. A collision of arrogant gods. Each with their own paradise to market. I spent my morning stripping the barbie dolls. My evening selling them on a conversation I wished had never happened.

The hard lines of their flesh were beautiful, but impossible to trust. My shoes at the door squeaked of storms long ago passed. That the ground had not yet forgotten. She would query the machines. In the space between the raindrops. As if she was sure. It would never stop.

Easier she told me to be the void.

The future she assumes is expressed in words not said. Awkward grabs punctuated by too many drugs. Time she contends is a surface. And travelling it is mandatory. The warm composite of skin on the jagged terrain of the hours. Solidifies the dominion of touch. The silence comes readily. Amid the loud voices in her head. Deaf lips trace the path of screaming fingers.

I was that close once. In failed contraptions not yet labelled. In heavy oceans sick with sand. We looked for the shells.

Do you hear. The waves crashing? As you hold the hard skin up to your head. Do you test the echo. Rub the tarnished grin for traces of when. Dark still mattered. And distance could still be calculated.

She assumes the past in absolutes. Trains violently following their tracks. It's easy to travel if you're willing to be shaken. She finds the future on the empty shelves. She had been saving for something better.

The bellman in his navy slacks stood looking. At the orange peel in the drain. The hours combust. In lenient explosions of skin. Salient stories to be told to the under garments left flat upon my death.

She nudges the clock. Frightened that it's been asleep this long. Teasing the dinosaurs as time manipulates her empty uterus.

Division comes in sharp epiphanies. The whole is a lie. The pieces survive us. To charm the window.

Still they open to nothing. Just as they always have.

Mute monkeys with big sticks in their hands. Looking for something to beat.

We fall up. We fall away. We try on the future with bullet holes in our knees.

The ceremony is not in the act. It's in the violation. Warm schism elongates the fetid paths. She grabbed her spare levers and stroked the motor hot. Calling it knowledge.

drugging the future with needles from the past.

Shifting the mirrors. The words all in reverse. I've been. She coughed. Seeing when. A grim layer of animation. Flushing her back into the center of the desert. Thirsty, she gulps the sand.

the timeline surges. In ripples of skin. We arrive. Here again. Wherever that is. With sand in our underwear. And no shoes on our feet. Counting. Still trying to determine. How many places we've been.

To prove the future is real.

They bite. Leaving only the itch behind.

Sad Galileo's suffocating in the length of lens. It's all so far away. The light coming so long after the source is dead. I could never get close enough. To see it alive.

Vultures. On their wooden wings. Scrape the bones. Bits of carcass become a feast. If you are willing to reach far enough inside that dead thing. I could tell you how I knew, but you wouldn't believe me. That I woke up one morning and saw the truth. It's over. It's over. So many times before it actually is.

I traced every one of their faces with a sharp number two pencil. I drew so many beautiful skeletons. But no flesh had they to feel with. No muscles by which to move.

She'll call it art if you let her, but she knows it's only living.

Parables debate their language. with sharp hooks through the pelvis. The dark is dominion more than mystery. Folds in the cancer. Scraped knees as the boxes shout their numbers. Small stones to pick up. If I can still reach them.

Making the bed. In creases of spoiled men. The jaundiced sex. Excitement enough. For the monkey thumping his stone. His dick the gavel. As the verdict is read.

The veiled incest. That draws the maps. The cumulative. Of ambitious clocks. Paused on the siren. Dead children. In the narrowing orbit of her uterus. Dark keys. That only unlock empty drawers.

She's had so many conversations with the wolf. Vague fairy tales. Arrogant with blood. She has carried the basket so far. Only to be astonished by the weight of its emptiness.

She knows it's still dark, though the light may be present. She fills in their graves with bland theories about the future. Going there is easy. Getting back not so much.

Sill nudging those demons. With an obvious agenda. Breadcrumbs everywhere. Leading back to the beginning.

The witch. Tempting us. With her candy houses. Killing arrives in dented boxes. But regardless, they are mine.

The tomb comes in pieces. Formulaic shreds of time chasing broken dials. With a soft voice and a cold fist. The constant. Eagerly casts her lips on the button. Sending us away from each other again.

Apart is not a function. Why is not a variable. I play with the numbers. Helplessly remiss to their logic. Hard edges make it impossible to remember the ones I've already counted.

So I start over. From the deep gate at the cusp of her pelvis. Using her tits like crutches. I stumble toward the gods. With kingdoms extracted from our flesh. Our bones their dirty highways. Our coffins their peripheral alphabets. As they tease the words. With letters not enough. Measuring the weight of nothing.

The code comes as her back consumes. All the dreary metaphors I've left to flourish. In the heat of the window's breath. Lost comes in confessions. NO rain. No wind. Just a clarity too confident. And the certainty of more storms still to come.

Cut flowers die slowly in the dirty water where we keep them.

This awful bed squeals with loose skin. Spent dolls emerge from touch's dour vending machine. Empty and lacking the math to find the future. Just claws. Flaking on the brick. Hidden doors. Seldom emerging.

Weakness. A frail catapult. Hurling its boulders. At walls that don't exist. The puppet speaks. In fractions of skin. I remember nothing and everything.

Gods with their erect penises ready to penetrate the smallest hole. Time is a vaccine. Not a cure. The monkey warned. You'll wake up. Between those moist sheets. And assume it's over.

But no matter when it happens you'll always be wrong.

Bare stockings on the shower rod. Dance against the shower's taunt. The lithe contrition flesh easily absolves. Remain. In the smell of her hair. And the halted press of her lips.

Noir cinemas spoil the dark. As the clowns collapse into that fallen tent. And all the lions give up their roars.

It's always a story. Beginning. Middle. End. Though we often skip ahead. To the rocking chair on the back porch. Rattling the door we always keep locked.

Knowledge enough I thought. As we hummed through the intersection. The ambulance's siren wailing just ahead. It's quarters in the vending machine. That sweet bit of candy not falling. Running. with dollar bills. To catch that genie. Grab on to that final wish.

It's chlorine in my eyes as I open them under the water. It's swimming. Pounding on the sand. Hoping someone is listening.

Red. Do you know why the moon is blind. Or the ocean deaf. Simple puzzles interrupt the music. As she deciphers the silence. In repellent fractions of how little. It matters.

Blue. Poorly rendered schematics turn on the numbers. She counts slowly toward the last. The end that isn't there. Gods with broken fists pounding on clouds. To make it rain again.

Yellow. The breach between her thighs panting electric pus. A tired rage lost in a mute combustion. The stick working its way through the gaps. That long journey to deliver grandma her basket.

White. This calm ladder of skin. Proposing a departure from physics. Her reaction is neither equal nor opposite. The inertia of why stalls on if.

Try on each catapult. The glass wants its stone. Slither inside each corpse. Vague and obsolete. As all graves are. Now that the dead can see.

The demons in their loose overcoats measure. How far away heaven is. The spectrum. Trickles of antidotes. Threatening all those diseases that would make us special.

The glass doors refuse to shut. As I look through them. To the nothing I am obligated to covet.

The balloon bursts. Obvious Absalom's. Draw their treasure maps on cracked lips. The blood comes easy if you smile wide enough.

Holding her breath. Short stories that don't know when to end. The scepter firm in her grip. As she culls her kingdom. The crown far from her head.

The rain tells its stories in angry pellets. Little guns make their holes in the glass. It trickles in. Blood through thick bandages. I recognize the wound. but these pieces of skin don't fit the bones.

Audacious mannequins. Flaunt the callouses. That only worn flesh can boast. The table confirms its many ropes. The mosquito bites. Sick with the blood. That once made us innocent.

The rope comes close. The echo of the doorway. As the lock opens. Another dirty key I'll never use again. Another compartment in heaven asking me to be patient.