An ode to the poetry of hands, that do what minds cannot, and forget.

When I was fifteen,

On the fifteenth day

Of the fifth month

I tried to find the universe in the veins of my wrists

To find the poetry of my blood in impassioned strokes

And I was only halfway

To double the completion

That has taken half my life

Twice over

To achieve

But I found out

That I do not bleed stars

In the way that the universe bleeds stars.

And three months after I turned nineteen

I tried to take up smoking

And the hands that had once tried to carve death into my skin

Tried once more to force it weightlessly into my lungs

Filling the cavity within my chest with the sighs

Of a thousand moonless nights

A thousand sleepless eyes

Staring down at the earth

Their haughty glances turn from reaching palms

Those same palms that now grasp into the air at night,

That search for your face,

That lean to touch your chest,

To hold your wrist,

To feel your ankle

Against mine.

That long to touch the life you left behind everywhere I go.

Recently I’ve been discovering what it means to have hands like Christ

To feel with my fingertips the silence that fell through generations

Falling like the snow that lands at my feet

Like the ashes of a thousand hearts on fire

Like the burning shame that coats young skin

Because their love does not reach the clouds

But falls down in the dust

That I’ll lie down in and whilst looking up at the heavens

Wave my arms with celestial grandeur and begin to make angels of my own.

And I’m beginning to know the feeling of my heart slipping through the holes in my palms as I offer it to the strangers passing me in the street

And I wonder whether I could hold anything close to Jesus these days without it falling through

Because I’m trying so hard not to lose him.

I’m searching for God wherever I go

I look in the mountains and in the rivers, where only whispers of his words still remain

Where they hide behind trees

And under rocks

And above my head

And I try to write down as many as I can,

Tearing parts of my life to inscribe on them the words he left behind.

Breaking apart my life to hold true to this syntax

So this is my prose, this is my ghost.

A ghastly replica of the worlds I could never grasp with these holey, holy hands of mine.

Every day I die a little more, dying, searching for a misplaced messiah

And maybe that’s why I carve my heart each day into the sunrise

And feel the colours bleed onto my fingertips

So that when I’m gone

The sun will keep carving my path after the moon,

Like the clouds and the skies in their mad love affair.

Like the cockroaches that love with such abandon

That they wear their skeletons on the outside.

But for now, my hands are stained with the ink, made from the colour of the sky.

So with these hands, I want to colour the memory of you,

I beg you to paint it onto my bones

So that a part of you will always envelop a part of me.

I want to write a symphony full of all the silences our conversations ever held

I want to tell you that the colour of your eyes seeps fire into my lungs

But there are so many things we will never speak.

So with these hands I will write

I will write you in the air around me

And in the whispers that creep into listening ears

So the sound of your existence won’t fade away.

I’ll write these verses onto the space inside atoms

Filling the universe with my memoir of you

So that each part of my being is inscribed with your history.

I want to be the heart inside a preacher’s song

And I want to tell the world that everyone was wrong.

But they were right.

They were right.

I wonder what it would feel like to draw fists with gipsy songs

To swing violence with my hips to the sound of symphonies

But I can’t live that way.

So I’ll tattoo peace on the inside of my veins

So my blood will learn to sing a different song than that of pain

So that those born into graves can feel again

And I search for God, because I think he knows

Knows what it feels like to lose love

Underneath the couch

And flying out the window

To wrap around the moon

And stare down at me while I try to catch you

Wrapping the earth in my embrace

As I reach out my arms for you.

Scrawling my poems

In staggered breath across staggered rocks

And trying

Not to cut my fingers.

So that this is the scripture that I write with my bare hands

These are the verses that my lungs command

I cut out parts of my life and cover it with the pages your words fill

I’ll turn each memory into a book

Wrapping your person in my prose

Filling my world with the promise both my hands know.

And I’ll let you forget.