you look ahead to where this will end but a complex of lies has no word count, no pages. cadences of a high school dance band convene in your mind like bachelors in the sweet gum of humiliation. you learn the languages of paper-folding and textbook indexing to express your droll processions of blight, those frumpy drops of righteous pornography in which you, you, only you hold the truest grain of currency, a token with which you gather mist and spoils from a zero-degree cloud of mathematical confusion. you can make a living off of this, from the sparkles of suicide, hunger, and your own slyest greed. you stand, basically naked, listening to the robots call your answering machine, listening for your name or an automated affirmation that the call is not for the woman who used this phone number for 40 years before you. your gutter fills with morning, with spoiled cream and a cold Syrian wind tossing about your kitchen, troubling your serenity with cultivated dissonances, thick and self-inflicted, juggled in the hands of your mind like the puzzled turnings of a child’s toy. one day you will speak outside of your confidentiality. your hymn of clutter, your song of lurid turmoil will jump from tension to cliché, a comic treacle that enters the room as a clown and never leaves, collecting graffiti in symmetrical slashes, the markings parallel but unevenly treaded, skillfully so, to distinguish the hecklings from the fallow depths of your song. one day next you will march up staircases not yet built, calling out for people never born, announcing delivery of their memories as you proudly produce the pre-sorted envelopes of their lives. the doors sit quizzically shut, stopped, consciously dead like your morning sleep from which you have no strength to awaken, the doors locked in their frames as your disdain is locked in your jaw. like you these doors are awake but they can not move. you are both prisoner and trespasser — how can that be? — in a phantom space of dead energy, a place where passion drowns and hunger hides under invisible bodily contortions. you do not look ahead. you do not look back. you are not missed.