The Colour of Hands

The Colour of Hands


Everything is four fingers and a thumb these days.
Your handprint has stained the summer and the blue bottles lay eggs in my throat. What have we done?
The bedtime of June; and a meltdown of green happened from the trees. We slid in malaise through the grip of the vassalage heat and took no solace from the sweaty green goo that stuck to laced-up shoes and soaked into yesterday’s t-shirt. Solace and green go hand in hand with me, usually, but at a time like this my hand was too busy with the brimstone and the casting of stones.
Your red suitcase was grooving away like eighties vinyl into that hand of yours, soon to leave indelible print on reinforced train glass and I would have offered assistance, but I felt too gooey green to speak, or to even turn around. You got lost back there somewhere and I could not care in the right way. The red suitcase chattered on cobbles, answering prayers, punctuating the occasion with broken wheel. It spoke of everything wrong with June and us and too many clothes you never wear anymore; a Santa sack of mediocre Red Blues; music in a North American airport.
Red and gooey-green;
Yellow sun sinking.
The Northbound train was there waiting when we arrived at the station. It hummed a promising tune that made me think of Tom Waits and sing-song washing-up times, en Français. The people waiting made me think of the buttons my Grandmother used to collect for no particular reason; I liked to shake the tin and feel the resonant chatter collect upon my fingertips and now the train noise became the button tin altogether; a cacophony of human language, dead ringing machine come to take my baby and yours, and yours.
Platform six had to be over the bridge, a monstrous contraption sent to test us. You sighed in resignation and licked a sweat droplet from your pillow lip; cautiously I had turned around by then and by chance, saw it. You dragged on up the bridge steps behind and muggy June tears choked up the mole between my breasts
Dry eyes
Hot reasoning.
I knew you were shattering behind me, the full stop of my decision taking your free will and stuffing it asphyxiated into a religious wormhole made just for you. I knew you couldn’t breathe and the reckless part of me wanted to administer the mouth to mouth you waited for. I pretended not to want it or anything at all. You remained suffocated and my will became your bible, it told you what to do. You sifted the pages with myopic fingers and I resolved stoically not to look back, or else be turned to gooey salt like Job’s wife in her stupidity.
Your train dozed before us, my bridge behind and I thought I might say something banal, instead you spoke. You grieved the middling of our long goodbye and all about the clocks crawled on like lazy blue bottles, covering the world with synchronized trudging; they printed their wake on our history and I thought I might die, right then and there in my decision and the demolition of you.
I prayed for rain.
Your train made a noise then, unrepeatable and I gobbled you up in my arms. The look of you in that hat from France, guitar from everywhere slung up strong behind your back, I missed how good you used to taste before the green got gooey. You held me at six-o-six and stood in the doorway of seven. A monsoon wrecked your face so all I could see was the baby you once were, red and wanting and no-one had ever told me how to be when this happened, so I just was and I was petulant with self pity, enraged by the milk I wasn’t getting and stomped on by a button God that had no use for this particular moment. I stood watching you stand, watching you crumble in little biscuit bits for me to follow and the blue bottles swarmed about your sweetness, vomiting and sucking up all that was left.
Corinthian hell
I put you to bed.
The doorway ate you eventually and I swayed, gentle as driftwood and as lost as.
Then it was there; your hand, a human remain of the corpse mutilated inside. It slopped up against the glass and your ring would have gleamed had the sun not been busy on the other side. The giant baby eating bug oozed away and your dismembered hand with its print stole up my entire brain from frontal lobe, loving up the cortex to blanket every hemisphere. I existed only for the tragedy of it, and at last I cried.

Losing … I waited for somebody to tell me what to do.