In the stubborn genetics of humanity we are all survivors. The discoveries. Fears and triumphs of neaderthal still seasoning our blood. On brass heartbeats life rises from the tarnish. Over sidewalks erupting with the roots of trees I wander the volcano wondering if any of our power is real. Are we evoultion? Or just the dinosaurs of today?

I'm usually more about personal moments. The one drone dissatisfied with the hive. The single word drowning in the vastness of the page. Trying to rescue it. Ballet slippers on every encounter. Nutcracker Suites beseeching idle Beethovens.

There will always be circumstances. Bottles much too easily. Too often opened. As humbled of our weakness as we are empowered by it. I was dead, but still I live. I've been broken so many times, but still I have all my pieces. I was born a child, but somehow became an adult. I am lost from everyone.

Except myself.

And that is all I need to know.

She wore the gap upon her brow. A quiet cough under her breath. The stillness. The threat. Of sad eyes smiling upon her skin. Leeches growing fat on the illness in her blood.

The parachute of touch not opening. The jump from a plane that didn't crash. The limp of solitude on broken crutches. The viocdin the darkness prescribes convincing found skin it's gone. Panic in proper doses minimizes the loss.

She counted the bricks between the windows. As the building stuttered down to her through the fractured rays of sun. With a needle hanging from its arm. With cracked sunglasses on its forehead. She imagined what might be behind the glass. But held her breath. Until it was dark enough that she couldn't tell.

We're not ugly. We're not beautiful. We're the blow jobs our mothers couldn't spit out. Tucked in the way of tomorrow. Dead as a speed bump under a flat tire.

There were no children in their future. Nor consolidation of trusts. Just a series of emotional enimas to pay off the mortgage on their hearts.

The world a box of crayons. 64 colors of men to test against the so many blank pages. I'd always imagined myself drawing the outlines, but never being the one to fill them in. I'd always treated sex as a tool. A way to repair what is broken.

I wish I knew what he thought as we flirted with oblivion. The differential honesty of lies. Making strangers of sex. The calm of hopelessness arriving in doses of despair. In words not loud enough. To scream as I do in my head. In cliches as naive as love would ask of us.

I only know the paper. How long it waits to be born. In cramps of ink that menstruate as poets pretend to know what to write. I only know how it sounds when there's nothing left to want. All those people like candles going out.

Our pain is the yardstick we meausre all our happiness against.

The moment is deep and dark and frivolous. Bound to a nonexistent climax. A white dress gagged by the girth of her hole. The hole in all of us. The echo of dreams unfinished. The scrape of the thumb against the trigger. While targets taunt.

A heart is deep and dark and frivolous. A swollen charm clutching a broken neck. Some pale magic whose only wishes are of dying. A lie interrupted.

Dark and frivolous. Stern in its chaos. Secure in her long legs. Trivial in her helplessness. An antidote more dangerous than dying.

An excuse. An obituary. A woman. A man. Deciding. How hard it would be.

The kitten. Lost in its claws. The circumstance deciding for us. We're a work of fiction and an autobiography. We're words no one has said. We're asking when we should be demanding.

To be loved.

Tugging up on the collar of sleep. Counting the words we have left. A scream in her pocket. Looking for the zipper she doesn't know is there.

Change occurs in little cuts. The slow infection of seldom sex like rope on her wrists. Like razors under her thumb. Acquiescing every mystery to gain contract of touch. With lawyers in your kiss. Juries under your skin.


Nothing is over and everything is. The pale curtain combusts. Of monologues not fitting. Costumes that wouldn't disguise. The prison in the space us.

A hushed balloon on the edge of pop. A serene driveway forfeits the exit.

Reconciling the science of lovers. And the chaos of sex. Loving the skin and hating it. For all the people it hides from me. For all myself it reveals to them.

The fantasy of truth making dark corners light. On the brink of extinction life awakens from the grave between my thighs. The science fiction of hope telling me lies.

Dead tears still blink like the warm dew between her thighs. Where her dress cuts her in half. Separating the doll from the clothes. In a throw of sighs. In the skip of words across a river of skin.

Thrown.

Into a potluck of manias. Bribed by the bridge to destroy it. Children of children. Thick outlines of lovers to color in. With our lost crayons. Grey pages drowned in the before. The after of having lived.

Treaties with devil. A calm roulette. Pasting those flower petal back onto their stems.

There are ways to measure. The distance, but not the depth.

The smoke chases the walls in fervent lisps. A stray lover scratching on her backsteps. Fattened by the sun at one moment. Bitten in half by the dark the next. Trump always goes to the coquette. No matter the hand you're holding.

The dewy tirades of convenient sex leave behind too many witnesses for any jury to overlook. There's no actual crime. But the memory is more than conviction enough.

We'd slump in the bed with jaundiced remorse. Rag dolls straining every stitch. Arguing with every the thread. As each one let a little more of what was inside out. We'd squirm in our plastic shoes. Tugging against every repair.

begging mutely to deafened gods. do nothing for me now. it's all i've ever wanted.

Thank you to whomever is the proprietor of The Differance Engine for their thoughtful post about some of my writings.

I cut away the long strands. Lighten my head. Searching the music for cues. Tracing the the memories for hints as to what's next. The spaces on the floor that weren't there until. The treasures we'd yet to bury. Now I can't remember where we left them.

Stripping away the skin. The fruit revealing the seeds of the person yet to break the surface. All we are is someone else's garden. Flowers to pick. Petals to be spent. Torn open like envelopes. Inside not what they expected.

In conversations with my future self I'd argue that she'd been to reticent. You can only be a child so long before you're devoured by your innocence. So grow up already. Admit. You chose those situations. Selected each individual to make it hurt all the better.

And I wanted to want. Things I could not have. Because there is nothing so seductive as what can't be had. No drug so potent as the forbidden.

Lacing up the boots of the hurricane. Pulling on the thick socks of the storm. I remember thinking I've been as close as I need to get. Alone like this is more than enough. That any closer would only prove us wrong.

We keep track of the castles. A desperate clock. We measure the folds in the sand. An anxious tide pushes us closer and further apart. There's a world under our feet and a world above us. A heaven and a hell simmering in each decision. A roulette in every lover. A bet. A hope. A trust. That our honesty won't betray us.

He talks in numbers. So that all I can do is add them up. He talks like the world was created just for us. So that all I can do is wait for him to stop.

I run my finger down the glass. Drawing my name in the perspiration. I tell him tomrrow I'll see him again. Cure us both of that transition. From victim to artist. Knowing the words have already begun to dismantle those rooms. Leaving only orphaned staircases. No way for us to return. Nothing left of us except blank pages for the shadows to color in.

I doctor the changes. As any addict would. Wrenching each story from its cumbersome truths. In earthquakes of submission. In suicides of acceptance. I lie. Tell them I feel things I can't anymore. While dead roots break through the pavement. The snarl of stray dogs devouring their pity of a meal. The croak of irony as we bleed ourselves young again. The grin of the rifle as it points. Aims as it should. Bound to see as the bullet would. The throttle of skin in its last few moments to be alive.

A pendulum reciting the years wasted trying to be loved. A picture. A negative. Of someone so close. All I needed to prove. it couldn't happen.

Tick. Tell those staircases to relax.

Tock. The chance was prize enough.

We watched some tv like we always do. Abandoned swings still chirping. Of orbiting lives in giggles and kicks. There wasn't anything of interest on. So we talked more than usual. Voices like fat markers on cardboard. Thick with new questions in every response. Thoughts on the loosest margins. Words a weight on all our tongues. Each of us happy to be together and none of us glad to be alive.

The clock stopped keeping track a few minutes before nine. As that one hour stretched on into four. A constipated storm cloud over all of our heads. A dollhouse. Ripe with cradles to sleep plastic children. And master bedrooms for poseable spouses. A perfect miniature of a flawed subject. The reality of ourselves shrunk down small enough to shallow. No lie so harsh as the the people we market ourselves as being.

We're peering through the tiny windows. Seeing birthdays and weddings. Jobs and sex. Because they must be real, if we are. Smaller from where we look, but still the same as us. As size is relative. And plastic a part of every wardrobe.

I'm feeling for the keys in the dark. The place to begin. Plant my crutch and go from there. Like all cripples do. Lean against whatever is hardest. Or else try to land on something soft.

I built this demon. From the toes to anus. Bent over on the toilet. Angry bowels scribbling down the words. In fits of vomit. The perfect truth of every heart is that love is our greatest flaw.

I had your eyes with me when I finally decided to change. I stencilled the pocket on the back of your ass. The little lies make all the difference. Especially when you know you were wrong.

The little wings of birds you can't name. The frail medicines you say make it better. The people like fireflies on the horizon. So far away. You wonder how you ever knew them.

On the edge of the road. Narrow footsteps lead us away from and take us back home. Carrying the sun on our backs. Calculating the distance between ourselves and the cars speeding passed. Treatments in every face. Love. Sex. Friendship. Drugs of a different flavor. Drugs still the same.

On our way there. Empty pockets bleed into the slow footsteps of dreams I'd had the night before. Cardboard cutouts of happiness looming larger than the window I'd set aside for them. The grass. The weeds. Breaking under our step. In a calm requiem. A marching band stomping off into Auschwitz. Where rage is the the lamb to our lion.

On our way back. Pockets laden with cellphones. Eyes flat enough to match the landscape. The world full of pockets that are full of nothing. Stale matches that won't flame. Little footprints in the dirt. Small steps in big shoes. All of us pretending the microscope isn't lying.