Cripped and stripped, bare down to the toe knuckles. There, by the sea, across the wharf, we sit. We sip. We spit. Yesterday takes enough of its time getting through, and we're barely on the other side. A smoky haze we've never better seen.
Slapped across your face, the knuckles at first hand themselves summarily in a swift motion. You know you have the same name for those on the feet. But, like saying the same word often enough that it starts to taste wrong, it looks weird. Knuckles, they just fit in your hand far more easily than when you put them away in socks, shoes, or potholes that just happen to appear out of nowhere. Like male pattern baldness in a toupee store catering to children who live under transmission towers.
Leaning over your beer gut, you can see the colour change as a band of pressure separates your toe nails from the foot. There in that chasm lies knuckles, a sonic boom of nothingness as you now feel the soft hardness of knees bracing for impact. You've toppled over trying to see how far you can press the flesh. Now, because you're all hip to making a keffiyeh like a towel hides sopping wet shower hair, you're on the floor.
The floor is what you call the ground when you're indoors. Like that bit about rats versus mice. The difference is in the piles and the plague. Also one crunches louder when you snap it in a trap. And we're not talking rodents any more.
Yes we are.
We are always talking about the rats and mice that crawl through the sands to sit themselves on the knuckles on your feet. It's their teloi as yours is to find another day away from the sea, by the wharf, sipping down salt water as your life raft floats toward the shallow end of the diving pool.
Written on Friday, 30 January 2015