break the hand

and the bread

it kneads break

the bars the bestiary

 

calls for a break

king of motion

come share this

commotion it gets

 

lonely there is

no brakes to the

breaking of my

own two hands

 

this god and all the wings spread in flight

            this better not kill me

on a sidewalk. On the park bench. On the road

                        overlooking barren boneland.

Maybe if I was born as murmur, I wouldn’t breathe

like a mistake. This magnificent unbecoming. How a day passes

 

and everything looks alive all of a sudden. How I hold my beating

chest and my feet respond.

All the ways I have tried to protect my hands

have failed miserably. I pray. A fingertip growing from a knuckle

crackling the midnight. I say what shivers at the break of dawn –

a sigh ballooning into a hue, the way I remember god saying

perhaps the dandelions are overgrown. Yes, do they outgrow my

raging hands? Two hands multiplying. Three sets of hands

crackling like firewood. One wrist clogged in sawdust. Two palms

striving to hang on to something. No brittle bursting into sunlight

I cap my hands from. No surrender. No salve no salve no salve

 

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