Nonsense, a fool.

the room filled with elephants.

this room isnt cold. the cold you would expect from a place like this. you are usually covered with goosebumps. you cling your jacket close to your body, not only for a safety-blanket (protection in such a vulnerable place), but also because you are cold. like in a hospital, the cold kills the germs that our wordly hands bring to a place that attempts to heal. you freeze and shivers travel along your spine. first your arms, then up your back to the tiny hairs on the back of your neck; the hairs stick out from your raised pores like a sunflower desperate for the suns attention (i'm desperate for your attention). but not here. here you are too warm. the heat slowly brings pink to your cheeks, like embarrassment. your unsteady breath only makes it warmer and you study the pictures and figures in shapes of elephants. a woman nods and smiles in your direction. she seems to be genuinely interested in the words that spill from your lips. but she just can't wait to go home and shower away the sad-life stories that she heard throughout the day. you hold back tears. tears that have been as regular in your life as the cold. this room was created for crying. you refuse the kleenex box that you are offered: not accepting the disease that it contains. a disease of acceptance. (you'll be all right. don't let them in. don't let them understand. they can never understand.) you think of all the hands that reach in eagerly to find the answer. the origin of their life where everything seemed to go wrong: the unloving husband, the pot-smoking child, the yelling boss. and you think of them and pity them (that's what they want--pity). you look back at the face that still displays the stage smile and are asked, "how does that make you feel?".

*****

evaporation into the world's system to clean itself

corpses' laugh in their graves and sing curses to the bats in their caves that wait for the moon to prick their ears with the song. the smile as fake as the rubber snake that scares me to death when you throw it in my face disappears with the same unrealistic grey of death. makeup painted on the dead woman's face. her hands folded, is she still praying to be saved? someone kill her, again, just to be safe. and i mistakenly brush my hand up against hers and now three months later i still feel cold.

one day when we are walking through the woods behind your house you and i are laughing again. and i smile thinking of how long it has been since i've seen you so happy. (i love when you smile.) but when silence falls like dust--you can only see in light--i turn around to see that you've disappeared. you were evaporated into a cloud. don't worry, this is just the world's system to clean itself. it begins to rain and i run. the rain washes everything away. (only the memory of you remains.)

it washed you away. and i lose myself (because you're gone) and disappear as the sun opens her eyes a moment too late to bring the sunshine. she could have saved me but she rather just forget me. she forgets me. i'm just a dream. it's best not to remember me. we both fall victim, lucky us, to: evaporation into the world's system to clean itself.



*****

camoflaged: seen or dismissed

rain is falling calmly and slowly down around the gas station where i sit in my mother's truck, waiting for my mother to pay for the gas that rushes into the tank. a man--but you would call him boy--rides on a bicycle, circling between and around vehicles that sit like unpleasant piles of clothes that needs to be put away. his camoflaged jacket is wet from the rain that continues to fall. it isn't heavy rain--it falls like a mist. just like the morning dew falls to clean the earth of her daily sins. the man doesn't wear the camoflage to hide. he asks every person who meets his eye to spare him some change. my mother says people like that scare her, they only want money for weed. i could feel the desperation in his eyes, every shake of the head or silence that screams 'fuck off'. he is dismissed before a sad story spills from his dry lips. lips that are desperate. and i sit in my truck protected from the rain, watching the circles the tires of his bike creates. all i want to do is dig around in my purse and find a few dollars (it isn't much), even if he uses the money to buy 'an escape' from this place. atleast i wasn't another person that pretends that he doesn't exist, or wish that he didn't.

human waste. pollution. an escape might be nice right about now.

*****

blue to red

address the keys on the piano (ebony and ivory exhausted) that her song filled the air that you breathed with hesitancy. you just wanted to taste the air that smelled of forever. now you cover yourself, you still cover yourself, with the same blanket she wiped her silent tears on the night she left your bed for the last time.

your alarm-clock-radio wakes you up with a sad song (this is a sad song). you raise your razor to your neck to shave away the hair that marks the days. and you lust to just give the blade a quick slice to the throat. pay attention! (stop breathing man. you're not breathing man). and the blue line turns to red, it appears just to show you that you're still alive. and you wear a jacket with the collar high to hide your failure from all of your colleages where you work at a desk, signing papers that need someone elses signature before they're mailed out to places you've never been before. (don't even consider yourself making it there.)

it's friday night and you throw your tie on the closet floor and forget your dinner in the microwave. and your heart starts a faster beat when the telephone sings. you hear nobody's voice on the other end, you curse and throw it down. oh fuck it! it beeps as the lines goes dead. you lift your hands to your face and hang your head. and you know that that was her.

*****

smoke

i wrote the truth (everything that you asked me and i never could tell you) in the lyrics, but you never heard because no one can sing. but us. but we're not together anymore because you took your hand from mine and made me swear that i wouldn't kiss you again. but the truth, the truth is that's all i've thought of since then. your lips touching mine like the moon touches your skin when we walk down the street at three in the morning.

we let our eyes tear up from the cold that slaps our wide-open, exposed pupils before we close them. (a great escape. an escape into the colorful world beneath our eyelids. a trapdoor?) and we watch the smoke from our mouths and hands, where we hold cigarettes, rise and disappear somewhere above in the black emptiness.

all i want to do is embrace the lips that took the "i love yous" from my tongue before i could tell you all that i wanted to tell you. but i keep my hands in my pockets from fear of touching you.

(don't worry my hands are much warmer in my pockets than in yours.)