6.02.2022

the itch of skin that is and is not mine

Perhaps it is 
because lightning once tricked its blue fingers 
along my spine, and called me 
 
out of nothing 
with a ghostly imperative. Perhaps it is 
the itch of skin that is and is not 
 
mine. A stranger to this life, 
am learning to read the iconography 
of green. Sleepless, I move 
 
through shadows, a master of solitude 
and little else but the moveless and wide dark 
from which doubt wells. 
 
Why do these borrowed eyes see, these 
cold fingers touch 
the nascent heads of supplicants reaching 
 
toward sun-shot sky? 
It can't be love—for what do I know of it? 
And not memory, 
 
for I have none. Why this desire then, 
this trembling to hold and to name? 
And what is this anxiety 
 
that hums in the root of all things, 
that I should be afraid 
to lose what I do not yet comprehend? 
 
[Steve Mueske, 'The Monster, On Living', from A Mnemonic for Desire]

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