What have these blunt fingers touched

what made this heart beat faster
in the flesh chest that grew it?

Before they became mine: became
the motley coat that is me?

Did this palm stroke softer flesh
in reciprocal love? My hands,

(if mine they be through mere possession)
may turn black from the kiss of frost.

Even these broad splayed toes
propelling me through snow.

My flesh spreads away from itself,
as if it too finds the latticework

of my woven skin disgusting.
He chases me now, a blind dog

chained to me by loathing.
Yet he sewed these fingers

with his own. These toes he assayed
as a surveyor uses an alidade

to map continents, or mere streets.
He loved the precious detail,

retracts himself from the whole,
and would smear me on the ice.

Me, the only one ever born
without a mother, made

by pure scientific fumbling.
And so we run.  Always north.

This sharpened North
tears my skin with teeth

always all its own.  My own teeth
tasted flesh I never saw;

this tongue may speak languages
that even he can’t speak.

I am the king of second-hand
The prince of second-feet.