The Palms, My Palms

Photo, unknown artist

On a cool October morning, I lie,

Woodplank back upon the floor,

And here...

My face hides

Beneath my folded arms,

Awkward branches staving off

The epiphany of light.

Too much light, I tell myself,

As if there were such a thing.

It has taken me this long

To get from there to here,

This

Being a measure of My Time,

A certain pretense of something my own

Inside the anonymity of this universe.

Something… what?

I cannot tell,

Nor can I know what thirst

Anguishes my fingers

While my empty palms are held

Open

White

Wanting

To skim the wounded glass of a forgotten window,

To graze the peeling husk of an abandoned door,

To know,

Something was here

But no longer is.

Memory is not such a bright thing,

I whisper to myself.

Some nights it means the tease of non-existence,

Some days it means losing something… twice

Having found it… once.

Are two losses better than one, I ask myself,

When one loss was quite enough

the first time around?

But now,

The palms…

My palms (for I do not disown them)

Are yet open

Like obsessing eyes

Even now

Even… knowing the hallucinations of memory

Are re-losses,

Even now

My palms are

Open

White

Wanting

too much light

To calm the thirst that swells

Like the arrhythmic appearance of lust,

Like a tide surrendering to the moon,

it was not my eyes that followed

but the tingling of my fingers that led

Wanting

To follow, obsessively,

to kiss the empty air in the wake of…

Wanting…

Oh, anguished fingers!

Oh, ailing bones!