I like the way the tendons stand out, the veins expose themselves, the knuckles curl. There is the grip, secure and sure.

The nails, blunt. Not chewed or damaged or hyper-gendered or fragmenting. Just blunt. The tears drop away quickly, the edges smooth within days. Frequently, I find crap beneath them, but it is earned crap. It is earth and compost. It is ripped from my scalp as I think. It is the foam from a bar of soap, scraping away at the lived experience of the body.

Sometimes my fingers smell in a way I don't want anyone else to smell. I lift them to my nostrils. I wash them before I leave my home.

Such is home.

I especially like the way they grip things. Not dicks, like they could, or swords even... but computer keys, my language, new instruments -- their sharp blades hidden until some button or pressure point is found and asserted... perhaps the mouse I carry with my computer because my hands are too warm and sweaty for the built-in mousepad. Or a steering wheel, the sides of a playground slide, an animal behind its bars.

Gentle, like the way I tap tap tap my puppy's head, or firm, the way I wrap his leash around my forefinger and thumb.

I grip the mail, my backpack and my camera; carried are my iPod, freshly picked tomatoes and the morning coffee; clutched are my second cup of coffee, my mother's evening brandy and my alarm clock as it tries to wake me in the morning; my opinion is palmed, along with the keys to a new mailbox, given me by my father, and the CD I've been listening to but don't want to share; I hold my dog's furry head in my armpit in the late-mornings, as well as my friends' weirdo books or art-projects or truths; I cling to the past, the forty student papers I've been trying to convince myself to grade, and Lambert--the 130-pound escape artist--as he strains against his leash on a walk; I take what is offered, but it doesn't come often, and usually it is attached with strings or expectations.

Sometimes, I touch what I didn't expect.
Or my hands enfold something nearly dying, still full of desire, maybe beautiful.

At times, that skin and bone and tenuous connection looks like an event happening, if you watch it for more than a snapshot in time. They have lines, scars in the infolds from where I clutched at rope while swinging out over a cliff, or leaned too close to a stove.

They have intention, in the reach you can clearly see. This motion resists metaphor; instead is movement, dance, and age, the finger a fuck-you you can interpret as you will. They curl and form fists and write. They currently own up to the glass splinter that has recently left their tips. Their life moves letters at an exceptional rate, once having directed failure, rebellion, boats during storm, escape, twitch, and no. yes. no. no. yes. During maybe.

They are sexual. Dyke hands. Listening hands; they hear bodies from every angle. They get angry at their own silence, how their expression occurs only in direct interaction with another object in motion. They hate their silence so much they live by story-telling. By motions made quietly in the dark.

Future rawhide, they move and move and make you stop just like tha






They apologize by still being visible, attached to the weaponry of their expression, the tools of their existence. Tightly, like chords on an operatic foray.