Go to sleep. Pattern your heartbeat after. Go to sleep that you may wake up in a new world. Where the clock has been reset.

Remember. Remember that the world is juxataposed. And aligned with. All the franctic nightmares you drink down they vomit up.

A fingertip apart we feel the air for an indication that we could. Or did. Like fallen rain we make our way into the sewers, Where losose change is lost. Where all forsaken is sent.

A dial tone between then and now it harbors. So redundant. Like memory is. The caustic glue that mends broken hearts. The blades that shred the evidence that.

I want to be alone, but I don't feel that I ever am. They smother me in their expectations. But never get what they want.

In failure and in triumph still the same. Hour after hour falls into. And those faces distort to fit their masks.

Not ugly to anyone except ourselves.

As we take them off and learn we were not changed by, but forced them to fit us.

If ever there was a mask and it wans't always only us.

Last night I'd only had three beers and then I decided to go to bed. And so I did. And fell asleep fairly easily. I almost always have four. I used to have five for awhile. So first I was getting worse, does this mean that now I'm getting better? Is this progress?

How could it be. Not possible. When I know it was three beers years back that led me to four and later the four that led to five. I've only managed somehow to rewind a bit, but once I press play again those same scenes will inevitably unfold the same as they did then.

Go back far enough it was only one. Even further back, it was none at all. How did none become so many? Choices. Not bad ones. Not good ones. Just the kind you don't realize you've chosen until it's too late to take them back.

So now it's New Year's Eve. The one night it's acceptable to drink as much as you want. The night where you pass out then wake up to a whole new year. An empty notebook. It's just begun. And you can do whatever you want with it.

People make resolutions. To become what they perceive as 'better people'. I've never been one to make resolutions. I never could resolve anything. Not myself. Nor anyone. And the changing of the hours, the days, the years, whatever, never seemed to have much impact. Just numbers and labels. That's all they are. Imaginary sign posts in our minds we use to reassure ourselves about how far we've gone.

Why celebrate how one year melts into the next? Pretend it can help us alter ourselves. When in reality it only emphasizes how very stagnant we are.

Everything around us is in constant flux and yet, we remain true to our most abject of conditions. We use events like this to tell ourselves we do change and can. But the truth is, we're the one thing that doesn't.

Absolved of every sin, except the one with which you now debate. Turn key orphans in locks picked shudder and turn to accomodate lost cylinders. Changes in climate.

We turn. The puzzle solved and wonder how. Amd if we could do it again.

That those pieces would yield the same way were it all to be taken apart and reassembled.

If time would allow. And this glass would relent. Looking out. Always looking out, but unable to see in.

And be seen. Caught on the tongue as fallen snowflakes might be. Found in the instant that they're lost.

The sugarless taste of winter and the empty reach of want.

As if it could be or that weakness would absolve.

It tastes just like summer, but I always wake up to the cold. They exit like the smoke does. One breath at a time. Until nothing remembers, but everything once was.

As if it could be. As if I'd know if it were to come.

Just then in its endless erudition. Learning in that existential way that lives tend to favor. Unrelenting and unwilling to acknowledge how real it is.

As if it could be. As if it wever was.

Groping now in your cold tumult. Your life only a pronoun. In your long sleeves. With your covered arms. Inky flesh prevails no expectations upon. Witty chestpieces fool them all.

Alone is the default. All other settings are temporary.

The bearings scream. The motor combusts. All the spinning has served little purpose. Other than to placate. Color the veins of dead leaves.

And once it's quiet again, you find yourself wanting those noises.

Because those sounds are real when nothing else is. The echo of the last drop as it catches your lips. THe rumble as glass and desk connect. The sound of empty in everything.

The sound of yourself and all you can do is listen.

It's gone and I never even saw it leave. It must've been. Or else how could I feel its loss. Like day turns to night sereptitiously. So quietly those fingers become a fist.

My shoulder is this chasm. Choking on all the words that drop. My tears are fallen. Not caught.

It left, though I never felt its entry. It's exit was acute. A triangle of nights that all pointed at. So many circles without their degrees.

It's gone like so many things that people claim. Fast talking hearts and amiable salespeople. A discount at a time they measure and negate.

How hard would it be to love me? How difficult could it be? To look at this broken staircase and place your foot upon it. Feel the climb it wishes to give.

How useless am I. Worthless as I've ever been. That even in your most desperate hour still you chose not to come to me.

Must it be? That everything that we share keeps us apart. That love adheres to such strict boundaries.

Where am I now? Nowhere. Always.

Broken or together. Still you see the same pieces. And you want none of them.

It's gone, but I still hope for its return. It's a collage. But that one picture is all I see.

Color me in with your heart's crayon. Don't leave these outlines to wonder if.

in mornings both stark and abundant gather the dreams last night dare not have dreamt. and we wake too early. irritated by the dampness. to soiled sheets. itching skin. clothes stained.

and a thousand baths still won't cleanse.

there was a window that briefly opened. i stuck my arm out and felt the kiss of an eager wind. as it carried life close to its breast. adn though i wanted it so much, i knew i belonged behind the glass.

perhaps in a life long gone we each were beautiful together. and only in this one we stare and wonder from behind these barriers.

it's life that revs under our flesh as we swallow the world in medicated capsules. it's the past that tunes these heavy engines as they rumble and moan for roads we'll never fetch.

it ought to suffice, just to ask, but the answer's a much greater burden than the question.

i don't know what we could be. but i know what we've been to each other.

truth accomdates. and life is lenient. but memory is so strict.

it's not hard to live with, but it can make it hard to want to live it.

don't you remember. don't you dare. it's not ours to keep anymore.

He watches from a distance. And I watch him, though he's not really there. I see him in my mind. 2am full of wine and uneasiness. Staring at the empty cyberworld out there as it vaguely stares back. Alone on Christmas Eve. 5pm, Christmas Day, again we are alone together. Staring at those former paths overgrown. Watching as the footprints fade behind the cloak of life's persistence.

I wonder. No. Fret over how he feels. Is he lonely. Is it my fault because I couldn't settle for what he was able to offer.

What he never understood. What I don't guess he can. Is that I didn't want more. Just to know somehow that what I was getting was genuine.

But maybe. Sometimes, I think. It wasn't him. That no one could ever convince me of that.

Alone can be seductive. Like any other drug. We start out wanting just a little and soon we don't know how to escape it. Even when we know we've had too much.

See, I thought I was punishing myself when I left. I never imagined it could matter to him.

Alone together. It broke my heart many times, but sometimes I still miss it.

just one night
such as this,
waiting for;
its gift to
be opened.


just one night
in all those we
dare collect;
chasing itself
like a string of lights.

just one bottle
and something changes,
the color of the night
as it bargain with
lives unwanted.

clean lines in the
darkness delineate, the
boudnaries of this island
as it fondles sharp the
edges of its coean.

no time left to amend
for promises inconsistent,
just night on its sharpest
edge, not asking, but
wanting to be seen.

in all the colors
that have always been there.

I was never more alone than when you were inside me. Filled with an emptiness so profound. That you could be inside my very skin and still I couldn't touch you at all.

Laying there afterwards deflated and numb. There is no pleasure in pleasure itself without substance.

Laying there afterwards it occured all of a sudden. You looked right at me, but I was not what you saw.

I've never been more alone than when I'm with someone. They pull their flesh close to mine. Stretch it across that cavernous expanse. A temporary bridge that always recoils leaving me stranded.

It's so much easier to be alone with yourself than to be alone with somone. Nothing lost. Nor to be found. No afterwards to underscore the obvious.

That alone is not a place I visit. It's where I live.

No afterwards here. Only ends.

your bewildered heart
beats on unceremonious;
in the was that is
we are now unto it given.

cold junkets of love
leave doting dreams
unattended; skeletons
turn to dust as we wait,

for all those things
to change that never will.

i have every night we
spent together, to prove
to me what i once was, but
it still isn't real.

it couldn't have been, otherwise
it would still be true.

if not here with me now,
then when, if ever could
you have been?

waking to the sky
too soft, and confessions
of friends, so the same,
lovers lost.

but what is gone
declares itself as never
having been, by the token
that it was not sought.

in dangerous nights with
your thoughts, you abide your
truth, until none is kind
and all is false.

it's alone that we are,
together or apart;
i've always known this,
so why is it more real tonight?

that we wore each other
lik faded jeans, until
we'd known no other skin.

that it became so true to me,
that i could believe the same of you.

I like to make a path down the center. There are three columns, four rows deep in every twelve pack of beer. A wall of bottles on either side as I travel through 12 ounces at a pace.

Protected from all that's outside those walls. At the center is everything and nothing. Just where it belongs.

But then, when the last bottle's left still blocking that path, i turn my focus to the edges. Because you have to leave something at the end of that road to keep yourself moving.

Who is that ghost in the mirror as I pass. All dressed up in her distorted wisdoms. Switching moods like songs because none seem to fit.

There's always a first bottle. Always a last. But how many are between them isn't so much a number as it is a measurement.

How far we've gone. So far still to go. So many walls. So few ways to go through them.

Who's that ghost? It's obvious. In every path. And in every wall. In every ounce it took to find them.

The center is what I seek, but god, how I miss the edge.

In the midst of a war with my registrar to transfer a domain it occured to me how powerless I am. As angry as I can sound it's still only words. Splintered moments digging paths into empty skins.

They enter on one end and quickly exit out the other. Almost as if they never were there to begin with.

In the midst of this western blasphemey we call christmas, it occured to me that I'm still waiting on a package.

Time hovers its nooses around these necks and the more we struggle the tighter the knot grips.

What it is I could give to them that I haven't already is unclear.

We'll find out I suppose when and if that package is ever delivered.

There is no normal life. Only time smoldering as it does in the throes of its fire. There is no green grass. Just fields that go on forever. As colorless from this side as they are from any other.

There is no empty nest. Only fledglings that failed to fly. Crippled at the base of this tree we call life.

I don't know when the sun went down in your world, but I do know it won't rise in this one.

Find yourself first and then everything else will be easier to.

Your tragedy is you don't know how fortunate you are.