We were stuck watching American Idol. Dividing the fake applause by the real to get our satisfaction quotient. In a collective sigh we all acknowleged Mark Burnett as the anitchrist and ushered in the next set of commercials. Squinting hard to find the shows within it.

If we were wood then we'd be better off. We could splinter. Sneak under people's skin. Infect them with our frail bits of pain. And they'd remember how it feels to be just a small piece of who you were. Plucked out of the same holes you created. Just residue. Evidence. Of which hole we entered. And throough which one we made our exit.

The neat geomoetry that is skin. At any angle it all adds up to same degrees. People layered like lunch meat in a sandwich. Their only purpose to be consumed. The only thing that makes us different is the bread we select. We're all someone else's fuel. Skittish gastanks burping out the miles like drunken parrots. Wondering if they still hear us.

And then we all learned it wasn't Jackson. It was Johnson. And I looked it up just to be certain. Wondering what else we thought we knew.

Outside the dollar store a man asked for directions to Princeton Avenue. He wasn't so much lost as just unsure. He was something out of the seventies. A little superheroish. The alter ego of. In a dull old Cadillac and wearing sunglasses in the rain.

It wasn't a hard sell to get him going from where we were. He was already headed in the right direction.

Just strange, getting asked for directions in February when you live next door to the ocean.

It used to be called the Laurelton Circle. Where our superhero was going. But now it's just a grandiose intersection. Bloated with u-turns and delayed greens. Keep right and you're headed for the big houses with lawns made of sand.

Stay in the middle and you'll hit the little cities we keep between the saltwater and the grass. Colloquial emissaries to the tourist trade. All old buildings surrounded by shiny new parking meters.

Go left and you're back where I first saw him. Looking like the nobody you see in so many comic books. The hero everyone's always looking at, but never can find.

I always wonder after I tell someone how to get there if they've found it.

The sarcasm came in stitches. Large needles opening old wounds. Petticoats of scars puffing up loose skin. Putting life into parenthesis. The chicken with its beak in its hand. Flirting with whores happiness pimps to all the barren apostles still dead enough to listen.

Tiny hammers in every jab of his tongue. Little pebbles under my breath. Building their boulders.

Frail instigations of worlds we'll never know. Pale exorcisms for those tainted by tomorrow. In gravelly gowns made of circumstance. In nightmares too ambivalent to fear. I sleep. Still awake enough to hear.

The hiss in the ears of deaf gods. The prowl of life in the throats of mute prophets.

The words proof enough.

By then everything is damp. And it all feels cold. Braids of vicodin throughout the mattes in her hair. She looks at us with exaggerated pupils. She laughs. A malignant ballad through the tremble in her lips.

Picking stabs from the vein like ready fruit. Turning solids into juice. With bashful hammers that want to wait. For a better time to kill. With open bottles unafraid to take the stage and sing along with the stale karaoke life farts out.

Dying melodies stabbing through the guts of a sentimental song. In the voices of characters we used to claim were ours. In the thick black outlines cartoons draw around their victims.

villains. everyone.

We watched the second hand have its stroke.

An old man. Someone's grandfather. Tearing off their diaper and shitting everywhere.

The lamp in the corner asked how long we'd be needing it on. Flaunting its spectacle to every corner of the room. Omniscient spotlight of eternity molesting its disciples. knowing we were alive only in the most nefarious sense. Cold grease paint pretending eroding faces. Sad clowns framed in flesh and blood. The fractured memoirs of emotional vagabonds. Written in the keen stare of the light bulb.

In the dust on the dresser. In the wear of the clothes inside its drawers. In the muted tv across from the sinking bed. A letter. Or rather a series of letters written long before we'd ever met.

Addressing ourselves now from before we were us. Plastic men shivering on poorly painted chess boards. Tripping over every square. Tumbling. Rivers of people. Of experience. Smoothing every edge. Until it's impossible to remember anything but a vague sense of remission causing the cancer to shrink back below our skin.

Letting the days comes as they always insist. Fractures of life deep fried in our thoughts. Crisp and golden. Greasy and hot. Burning the roofs of our mouths as we try to swallow.

The book was read. Stencilled jaggedly into the bone of her brain. The dull hopscotch pebbling calm over each square. Designating the practical portions of her heart. Like the failed time lines that wore us as children. Ironing the fetid capes for our former heroes.

In little sips the world dares to focus. Disregarding its broken lens. In big gulps the happiness succumbs to dementia. Frail old woman forgetting her future. Of infancy all over again.

In practiced lies she charmed the river. To give the concrete chance to dry. All her pseudonyms finally telling. Jackhammers turning concrete into pudding.

We crawl in diapers full of feces. We learn to walk bobbing against the arms of strangers. Clown faces taller than our worst nightmare. We run with shoes unlaced. Hoping to fall.

The lamp made a green sun on the wall. The construction paper sort a child might draw. The refrigerator wheezed as I tore into its chest. Grabbing a capillary then leaving it alone again with its asthma. The green sun looked familiar as it blinked at me from its very beige canvas. A differential spotlight for all those moments famous only for how quickly we forget.

The green sun. A cartoon eye staring at the anvils over my head.

The kitchen floor was baked frigid and flat against the earth below. Recylced swamp constantly exhaling the stench of my every confession. Written in footsteps too quiet to hear. Lit by green suns too close to show.

The treason that writes us. When we're fumbling with the chilled cardboard hampers from which we retrieve our wardrobe. Dressed in trails of stale breadcrumbs our lives have left.

Lost inside walls so beige.

the stench of repetion swollen inside every breath.

She turned on her cardboard heels and doused him inh her only thought. I'm never lonely so long as it hurts. Just like putting out a fire before it starts.

I'm lips. Drawn in crayons without labels. I'm a droning cunt always vacant. I'm brick red. I'm peach. Words describing things that can't be seen. Microscopic mirrors resounding every resignation.

She took the glass between her fingers like a candy bar pouting red. Hunting for the stop sign pain promises.

He was calm. Still not reflected in the glass.

As she she pushed the pieces deeper into her arm.

She was looking at the floor. Tracing the footstep. A calloused map.

Of all the plasces we can never go again.

She was watching the eyebrow on the night rise and ebb. While pieces of tomorrow winked on the horizon like so many distant sailboats on a voyage much longer than the wind. The perfect certainty of hopelessness rigid as the wood of a crucifix.

The hours. Each of them cascading in an endless sneeze of unravelling bowels. The more you pull away the more that your insides fall out.

She was taking her life in doses. In orange cylinders with typewritten instructions on how much and how often to she was to be saved.

The hours. Each of them. Stabbing into the next. A series of so many tiny toothpicks to animate the dead.

The snarl of the zipper was all the love she needed for the time being. Copper monsters with claws made of penis. There's a fairy tale in every inch of skin. Rapunzels with ladders of hair begging to be saved. Witches with their chocolate architects. To tempt the hungry.

She wanted to be swallowed by the wolf, but he had already eaten.

The croak of afterward like a crippled frog. Listlessly bartering for flies it doesn't even want.

There were trolls at the backdoor as she coutned the passing headlights. Turtles in their moral races drawing sneakers on anyone's god. The were beds that never came. Stale effigies ironed from the ripe meat of partial orgrams. Poorly intimating the life we shared with it. A beggar's wishing well. Collecting interest on every secret.

There were so many choices.

There were none.

Her book was on the kitchen table. Patiently waiting to be read. The weight of too many winters pulling the curls from her hair. Ambient eulogies in shudders of cardboard. The ambivalent anarchy that is hopelessness.

The messages waited impatiently as she traced her footsteps. From the doorway to the chair. From salvation to surrender. The stoic algebra that is sanity turning wide eyes into calculators.

Her book was on the table, but her eyes were on the stove. As it counted down the seconds untl the pie was done. The apples all in an uproar. The crust mad with indignation. As she scorned their warmth in favor of the cold out there.

The nothing turns like a screw through this cork. Not opening this bottle to the world. But allowing the world to drain it.

Or else it was always empty. And now it's so certain. Inoperable cancers tell their stories in squeaks and dribbles. Our attempts to live. Incurable diseases. Draw the outlines for our portraits.

And we are all artists. immortal because we know why. Or once knew. Why we're still alive.

The coma close enough to marry.

There are ways to measure the absence, but I've never cared for their methods. Plastic devil's horns on heavy heads. The sequins in their stare unwilling to negotiate with my pain. That I thought was ours way back when. In the tiny orgasms of love that led me to believe I was that small.

You think too much.

You reason like a corpse does. Death the beginning, not the end. You tell yourself this death is the last one. Like very addict will. So many times. You purchase your loves at the backdoor. From cheap prostitutes. As the lonely must. Swim through those puddles of sour sex to find the new.

Rationalizing your grave in so many metaphors. Wearing those other universes just as they would wear you.

Hoping you won't be found.

There were onions in the pot. Hissing like bad dreams do even through the first cup of coffee. There was sweat on her spatula as she shuffled the ingredients through the flame. Eagerly pushing the raw out of her way.

There was talk of purgatory and liasons with dementia. As we scoured through the scraps for soemthing to eat. Hungry enough to put it in our mouths. But too optimistic to keep from throwing it up. It's all story when taken slowly. The lazy paragraphs of life come into focus in a rush of humility.

It might be noon instead of midnight. Since I can't see from here if the clock says am or pm. I might be in so many elsewheres wondering if there are other me's. A complete range of me's from the most miserable to the happiest separated by only our obsession with ourselves.

Just as Roddenberry promised. Just as Star Trek iterated time and again. This is one outcome. This is one of the lives I could've lived. Somewhere there are better me's. And somewhere else there are worse ones.