Surfaces is a matter poem, spinning thoughts on how we collide every day, sometimes it hurts, sometimes it soothes. But there’s always an impact.
Surfaces – Matter Poem
I can trace the indentations on my skin, the skin that lay0
on gravel, fingernails resting in our thick dust,
but I cannot see the calluses on your feet, the leather skin
you had to steal. The surface of everything is uneven,
rough even, like my fingerprints and coarse nutshells
in want of cracking. Or a cowhide. I remember Grandad’s
hands with grooves deep as valleys and cuts from chiselling
animals out of stone. We always wondered why he bothered
seeing as no one liked them, us, kids giggling or firing
water balloons at them. Now, there’s an ill-matched pair /
granite and water-filled skin-thin rubber, not like a
bicycle tire fit to hold and lift the weight of a fat man or
woman or dog with blubber covering dry shoulderblades,
the only knives that don’t glide through most surfaces like
flesh or fresh tomatoes, price wires apart to ready them for
the creation of sparks between touching bodies. I got
hit by lightning once, my curves shriveling on impact of
matterless power just before we met and didn’t clash like
I do with smooth gloss. Running my cold fingertips along
the tender skin on his tiny nose, I wonder, is he, metal or
butter, will he sizzle on marble or shatter on impact or
rise above like a bird, too clever to collide with glass
panes, cold like the mirror bouncing my pimples
back to me, surface to surface, my skin a soap opera of
collison tales, a pop-up book of fairytales.
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