Waiting I turn my eyes to the sky, its pouch turned again, For everything is in it…airing its lining of air, our last and faulty containment; imperfect in that its blackness is holed through with stars.
Here, where they fall, there…the setting for all revolution, perpetually revolting against even itself: party of the first part I haven’t met in a moon; party of the second part’s never invited. We turn. Everything here’s exclusive to how abject anyone’s able to get, privileged to the extent of how pitiful anyone’s willing to afford. Turn again. We’re drinking too much, smoking whatever will flare. Debates rebut into night, which is morning. Utopian ideals getting yelled down into insult, namecalling, and accusation: you stole my spoonbone, We Hereby Resolve you slept with my wife…keep your clause off her, be still; arguments sobering over what mud we call coffee, the ersatz thaw of the river steeped tea in our dirt. Place your dues in a bag, place the bag in a cup, by the time we’re done meeting it’s melted. Religions are founded, abandoned. Degenerate into governments imposed, then elected, forsaken. Constitutions cried in the sand. I’m keeping silent, how not to, but they think I’m withholding. It feels like we’re all in a search, but for what…even after what we’ve survived, especially after what we’ve survived — we want to keep faith, need belief…
On one hand—there’s serious worth going around, changing minds changing hands, circulations up & down, side-to-side.
On the other hand—everything seems foolish if you think about it enough, practically speaking, and even in thought, too, it’s hurtful, every proposal an impasse, any pronouncement’s tongue a deadend.
We’re all living too real, not really at all.
Two hands, I can count them on one — never mine.
I’m thinking: the nerve of those who’d confuse purpose for self, chutzpah I’m saying, mixing ideology with mensch — those who’d confound us with anything that isn’t an Eden elective. How it’s only a Market if you buy into it; it’s only capital if you’re able to capitalize, it’s only communal if you’re willing to share — and I’m not, either or both.
I’ll live without system or governance, without authority or Law — even our own, whose only purpose has ever been to destroy me, to drain us of blood and wringout the necks of our pockets, leaving our corpse for the auction-block, the prisonblock, for the flames of the oven…I’ll live. I leave on my own, as my own, quitting this veinvend, the frenzied flowed lode of this arterial art, wandering out from the Street: not past the moneyedhalls and hagglestalls, not following the swallowing around and again and engorging, but leaving it altogether, making a right or left, refuting the straightly narrowed, the giving take of moat’s icy margin to water, shattering under my step down and dispersing, feet smashing through into nothing deeper than a shallowness underlying, disappointment, wet heels — to earth if not perfect then mutual, or equal…I’m thinking, nothing but free.
I’m on one hand.
As far as hands go, it’s humungous, haired around the knuckles each the size of a house, its wrist and forearm ascending up to the heavens, to Heaven, piercing the bulge of the clouds — then out the stratosphere, unto what.
Mind the shvitz of the palm…to keep from falling, have to hold on with my own.
A day’s wander from the Market and I’m here at the edge of the known undecided: making my way up and over boulders and elbowy, shouldery cliffs, stepping steeply this road rising high between two valleys below that are hands. Twins on both sides, just over this dusksloppy raphe, descending from the sky, or ascending from the earth, God knows which with the weather, the smoke. All valleyed is marl, a bleached, bony whiteness washedout with gray at the edges, what I’m saying is, vain…how to remember, how it blurs with the clouds as if they’re the joints of lightning limbs, their snapping and pop with the thunder. It’s been told, in rumors, in gossipings heard as historical fact, as geography, too, let’s talk topos: all about the shoe mountain, say, or the hair-pike, I’ve been there, climbed that, horsts up from any ultima graben…the Hill of Glasses, and the Suitcase Peak, I’ve been around, made the grade, scaled the heights — tectonic remnants, artifacts of destruction past, the war’s spoilings the heaped remains of sacrifices comprising the altared cliffs upon which a future has to be founded. A nest, an egg hatched, halfshelled…but this. I descend again a valley, go on to the other hand — it’s hard to believe, even now.
Questions, count them up by the fingers. Who knows where such hands have been? I don’t, just fall myself down into their cup.
This other hand’s huge itself, similarly haired around the knuckles each the heft of a house, its wrist flexed to forearm outstretching above.
I’m on this hand, then go from this hand to the other, that that’s previously this — what to do?
On one hand, I sit in the shade of a callus and think; on the other hand, I sleep tight among its fingers, between them.
On one hand, I lap at the wet of its palm; on the other hand, I gnaw its nails out of stress, and then mine.
On the one hand…I should turn myself in, and on the other, what good would that do?
Questions…I commute them a back and forth, crossing the fingers, fording my fortunes — Septentrio, Meridies, Oriens, and Occidens be their names, the orientations of their previous flows: lifelined, heartlined gullies and gulches, stonedry riverbeds, the graves of streams their own markers frozen to rock, their meandering wanders foretelling in script and in squiggle ways longer and harder than any would ever keep on. On one hand, what about my people! Questions, I’m asking the questions. On the other hand, what about my people? That’s what I want to know. How these fingers feel for each other, they feel one another…they’re elementally stiff, they’re ancient yet reminding themselves they’re still alive, maybe, how despite age, all their wear and the rheumatoid arthritic denial, they’re still living fingers and powerful, knuckled and full with flesh and toughened, so strong — perhaps those that’d made the world’s what I’m thinking, the original digits: they formed the head of the earth, poked the oceans, pressed into the softnessness of the depths, molding flesh…they’re giving a creaking, a cracking of wood or an earthquake, a skyshake this quivering shiver to fall — I’m knocked from my feet to the foot of the thenar, the Mound, that’s what it’s known as around here, the valley’s slow rise toward the thumb.