I saw him from across the café hall—he was leafing through a magazine and smoking a slender clove cigarette from between the opaque fingers on his right hand. His eyes—green eyes—struck me like a shrapnel. His fingers were laced along thick blue veins with streaks of white flesh crawling up around them, bony and weathered, stretched like the fingers of a man only a few heartbeats from death. His face was the pale color of floating ash, with sunken eyes and a black gaping hole for a mouth prot...

What could this be this light at the edge of my window where I see the fire, the outline of an angel the brightness that illuminates the shadows before me? Oh the divinity of the mystery, the reincarnation of the golden sun as it might have been! I see it, and it sees me a light so brilliant that it creates its own day and flashes like the moon on a cloudless night. And what a surprise it was to me as I lay here in my sleep naked in the arms of my blankets, when all of a sudden it could have ...

I smoked my last cigarette tonight, though I wasn't with myself while smoking it. I was projecting myself into the living room of the people who live in the house that's behind mine through a wall of naked trees. Their lights are always on at night. I tried, at times, to roll the smoke on my tongue so that I might remember it someday when I would no longer be able to have it, because I'm making promises. Promises to, you know, be kind to myself, to not poison myself or stretch myself too thi...

That night, the night she was wearing her black robe with the strings tied tightly around her body--it made her ribs stick out, you remember, like wire and the scent of illusion--she was thinking about the last time she had witnessed a full moon. You watched her slip between the creases in the absense of all light, in the shadows; you watched her move between the doors, you tasted the soft flesh along the long arches of her ballroom feet as she walked, as she danced; she waltzed around the na...

Riding in the bed of an old metal truck as the velvet of the sky passes overhead--this is not allowed because it is beautiful. I say, let men burn their constellations. Let men burn what should not be right. Let us burn that which is forbidden. Forbidden is the space and gravity between bodies of time and virtue. Forbidden are the things that make us smile. A kiss, secret pages, the push and pull of nature. We are not to touch that which lies behind the glass. The sweet collision of skin-on-s...

We saw the brain on the steps leading up out of the tunnel, above us we heard Paris on the verge of bones and starvation. It was dark out and she saw me I was afraid, she held me in her arms, sweet arms, like legs and movable skin. They were going to keep us in the underground. Our food was to be slaughtered by our own rotting fingers, our hands were pouring out ants, bittersweet syrup lactating through our pores and muscles; teeth bit through skulls and joints tore loose because they were pu...

I am a vertiginous sphere of endless anatomy --my body, the never-ending sculpture made out of wood and metal and stone, covered in flesh, laced with blood-- and so many fine artists have built me a crust around the edges, an impenetrable crust, crust made of dried flower petals and thickly drawn musical notes and bones being farmed from the underground. So many have built me up on paintbrush stilts and then have torn me down. So many have added appendages, taken away my senses and thrown me ...

I saw him from across the café hall--he was leafing through a magazine and smoking a slender clove cigarette from between the opaque fingers on his right hand. His eyes--green eyes--struck me like a shrapnel shot through the air by his blinking gaze, launched partly in my direction, and party in the direction of the mural sitting on the wall behind me. His fingers were laced along thick blue veins with streaks of white flesh crawling up around them, bony and weathered, stretched like the fing...