I.

There, in frostbitten Greenland sun
you shake and you rattle
unders and overs of palms
red and purple, numb and beating,
sore and sorry.

II.

I have often wondered
why his palms sweat
when he’s happy.

III.

Don’t just sit there--
put yourself to work!
Gain those discolored marks
and scars and
hard-earned, honest pay.

IV.

Outside of the humid Friday
hard day’s night, a karaoke bar
where your friend has just been
pushed around for the last time.
Centers of those white knuckles split with red
when you watch him take a hit
in a musky alley brawl
you had set up for yourself.

V.

Warm fingers
curl around one another
whenever you’re scared
listening to your mom’s mixtape
without anything to care about.

VII.

Tapping away at keys, as it’s what we like to call work
in a much more complicated and dignified time--
beyond our own, in fact
and it never seems to cease, save for that beat of thought
as to what the next line will be.

VIII.

What is daddy making today?
A dog, a fish, a butterfly
in the dark, magic ink?
He’s so very good at it.
He says he would teach me,
but my hands are too small.
I wouldn’t be much good at it anyway.
Would I?

IX.

“Yes, it’s all he can understand now.”
She says, but I don’t know that.
All I’m going off of is
alignment of my best friend’s
slimmer palms,
the way he twists them
and waves them.

X.

No, it is not a crime
in sentiment
to tell him
how that beat he makes
on the glossy wood-and-plastic table
is the most poetic math-class
sound I could ever hear.

XI.

I am
very very very very very very
tired.
So tired that it is hard to believe
that I woke up this morning.
82 years
and my carpal bones
are far past their prime.
My skin hangs off of them
like limp pieces of wet paper.
And I feel them growing
much much much much more colder
with every passing day.