Kobus MoolmanTHE HANDThis is me talking to me. This is me holding up my hand and looking deep within. This is me closing my eyes and listening to the voices speaking within. This is me talking to me. Is anybody listening? Am I listening? My hand swims through the quick water of daylight, through the slow water of the night; my hand burns during the day and curls into brown smoke, my hand burns at night and crackles with electricity. It jumps when anyone walks past. It gasps and takes in deep breaths and stumbles over its broken teeth when anyone asks a question. Is anybody listening? Am I even listening? I do not want to listen. I do not want to sit and wait, holding my hand in my hand like a woman in the cold, a woman in the cold and the dark cradling a dead child, like a woman cradling nothing. I hear the hand all day. I hear it whispering behind walls. Behind thin doors. I hear it in my dreams. In my desire. My lust is filled with the dark blood of my hand, the dark light that pulls, that calls, that pulls like a heavy rope at my heart. I look at my hand and see the scars of fires and knives. I look at my hand and see the calluses of stones and sticks. I look at my hand and hear the slow bending of bone, the curling tongue of tissue and vein as the old words of my heart close upon themselves like a leaf, like the leaves of plants in dry lands desperate to preserve the little that remains in their veins. I hear my hand call out and I turn my back. I turn away from the sight of its large fingers curled around the hole in my back, its hard skin closing tightly like a scar over the site of so many scalpels, over the loss of so many shoes. The absence of feeling. Of so many feelings. The feeling of being me, when I am so few other things too. This is me talking. Me talking to me. Me not talking to the one me that really exists. That is at the still centre of the storm. That I have never seen. Only smelt. The smell of lost flowers. The smell of lost hair. Eyes that opened once, flashed like water under the sun, spontaneously, and then were gone. Beneath the black rock of fear. This is me talking. Is anybody listening? Me talking. Because I cannot do anything else. Cannot run, jump, climb, skip, hurry, walk to the end of the road. Barely stand without falling over. Because it is only my hand that holds me up, that holds me onto the narrow path, where there are no handholds, only deep and empty falling. But the hand is mortal. The hand is not God. Nothing comes without a price. So it must burn. It must suffer for justifying me. Am I listening? Is anybody listening? How much longer before my hand gives up? Gives up talking, holding on through the smoke and the flames, hoping to hear an answer of water, gives up and closes the windows to its salvation? |