lying to reduce my words to nothingness, to create streams of syllables so muddled with falsehoods, even the sound of my voice is a contradiction. my body as well. the mere shift of skin on the couch, bend of knees, click-click twist of my wrist as i open a kitchen cabinet cuts a lie through the air so thick it swells, splits, exposing all the oxygen till it browns. wherever i sit or stand, any moment along time’s sticky filament, i'm utterly meaningless. a mouth emitting incomprehensible vibrations, movements disrupting nothing.

last night i dreamt America became so paranoid of conspiracy that fat legislatures with filthy fingernails stamped a law mandating lucency. citizens were required to exist without whisper, exposed wholly by living in glass houses with clear couches, drive see-through cars through see-through neighborhoods & swallow transparency pills every night while tucked in bed in order to drain all pigment from their skin. as if the citizens held within their bellies a thousand spies, between the notches of their spines, a hundred blasphemous betrayals. or as if the body was a secret in & of itself.