Fingers
All this stupid ranting and raving I do:
the whining,
the bitching and moaning:
“my knee,”
“my boy,”
“the ex,”
“I have no money,”
and sometimes,
it’s all such a lie.
And then,
when all I need
is to let the roar out,
to let it escape into the black night
and the infinite sky
and the eight million and twelve stars;
when all I need
is to find moist damp fingers
kind enough to capture my own;
when all I need
is to find
some diamond eyes
so crazily cut,
so oddly set,
that there is some crack
or crevice
that I can settle into,
only then does everything crumble
like a tide-old sandcastle
built just not quite far enough inland
to avoid
the eroding, corroding, decaying, demolishing
Poseidon’s hand of
tide and current and undertow and
everything is the moon’s fault.
It sings to me
and like a child enticed
by the Pied Piper’s melody,
I will worship Pan,
dance to his overwhelming flute,
rejoice with his kindred spirits,
like Dionysus,
who has taught me
how to drink
and fuck
and love
and dance around the edges of the flame
without ever getting burnt.
And like my teachers
and their teachers
and all the eight million and twelve other students,
I will follow the best example
and let the roar out,
let it escape,
give myself to the moon
and all its trappings –
the tides and undertows and currents
and the waves that will knock me over.
And I will forget how to whine.
Bitching and moaning will cease to be necessity.
And I will discover
in every corner of every attic,
beneath the cobwebs and past the dusty Pandora’s boxes,
so many damp moist fingers
already so forcefully, desperately
entwining my hands
that I will almost give myself away
and let you see those salty traitors
drown you and me,
but I won’t.
Instead,
I’ll let that raw primal fierce roar out
to slice through the still night air
and be satisfied to know
that without salty traitors and smeared mascara
I can still feel so many
of your damp moist fingers squeezing my hands
that I almost can’t even recognize
my own.
copyright 2006 Katherine Andrews
