Hands

My hands do not look like my own hands. They did once but do no longer. I stare at them now with eyes trapped in these prisons called order. They say there is no order without chaos. I say there is no order, only chaos, masked and renamed. Order being the pseudonym, the last resort or the disillusioned, disenfranchised youth of a world where you can look at your hands, and notice they don’t look like your own.

I heard once that most people won’t recognize a photo of the back of their hand. Not that I’m surprised. Now I know never to follow someone who boasts they know streets like lines on palms and knuckles of hands that don’t look like their own.

My hands do not look like my own, and now I know why. It’s the words. They’re trapped like I feel. They hide in tiny folds of skin, inside old scars and they burrow in bloody, bitten fingernails. My hands do not look like my own because my mind can’t believe that they make these words real. Cannot believe that they hold pens and fill pages with scrawled ink that may inspire, The mind can’t believe that these hands, ordinary though they appear, may rip the mask of disguised order, bring chaos and restore the strange balance which holds the stitches of life together.