Holding Hands

What did you expect?  What did you imagine when you held my hand?  What future were you holding onto when I was your child, or your first boyfriend, of your last husband, or I was your nurse?  This is digital science, a seance for the touch that has faded, or been forgotten.  Do you remember the way fingerprints tint cold glass and then evaporate leaving behind the clear figments of our false imagination, the oiled paisley designs?  

Blow your soul against the pane and the stain will rematerialize, 

return, 

reform, 

refade.  

All I am saying is that your fat, sausage thumbs, (or my bony, arthritic fingers) are but numbers and that this faceted appendage evolved by dumb accident to pave the wild intelligence of our species with the genius  of counting.  This is fact.  This is history, and some millenia later the progression from metaphor to math would manage to split the atom, destroy the ozone and put men on the moon.

  

Two pinkies and a hand, now they stand in church, and now they land on the keyboard,  and--if you think about it--cat's cradle is alot like holding hands.

This is the one gesture that is immune to the ruinous sexualization of most physical communication.  Hands linked with hands, the very edge of each being, the end of two ropes, the beginning of "reach", that bridge that teaches us everything about the alienation of body from body and the tenuous connection between the two.

The egotism at the core of both motivation and desire is wired into the isolation of body from body by body.  Discrete, yet drinking from the same pitcher, breathing the same sustaining air, the individual identifies with others while knowing (even if not admitting) the essential isolation of being.  Whether or not this predicament translates into loneliness becomes wholly dispositional: A so-called pessimist might derive ratification from this state of affairs thus bolstering his or her confidence in the accuracy of her or his world view; an optimist, on the other hand, might fight tooth and nail against the very idea.  As is often the case in such matters, his or her struggle will give the monster teeth.  

It may be obvious in this dichotomy that the underlying tenets of this world view align neatly with what is commonly considered a "darker" and existential perspective.  But to the body (the mind within the body, the soul within the mind) that is cognizant of this dilemma, denial would be self delusion; apparent truth must be absorbed as truth and the explanation--even while being read negatively by a considerable portion of the audience--is actually a salve for those who instinctively see (and feel) this separation.  In point of fact, the connection and communication that can be achieved and activated between bodies (minds, souls) will be eclipsed by the lie if these facts are not integrated.  I am not advocating forcing this lens on those who, either by faith or simplicity, are not inclined to engage this idea and the questions that it generates.  However, a facile dismissal of the content is dishonest and impossible for the individual who, unglued from others, sees their being as essentially alone.

Here/Now

I am in the furthest time zone
on the loneliest coast of a distended peninsula,
a remote island,
uncharted sea
lost on a planet
spinning
on the thin thread
of my damned lineage.