Poem: Hands Freeze

 

Hands Freeze

 

my fingers no longer onboard,

rejecting designs,

callous toward volition.

workers who protest the boss, on strike,

perched as cripples,

needy as claws of a vulture

to plunge into warm ooze.

 

fingers, no,

 

they are bars of a cage, 

insurgent to trespass through flesh,

keen to disprove

every philosopher

who thought the soul real--

 

instead to unveil  

a construct of candles,

flickers of willow-o’-wisp,

flames mean under follicle and pore.

 

a hot, fleet travail of ethers,

such is the chemical of the soul,

borne in an outrage of sparks,

nothing more, 

and yet 

 

one by one, those sparks slow,

stilled by the crooks atop my palms,

runty frostbitten staffs--

and their cold shepherd,

a cruel Physics,

who herds numb thoughts home.

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