FEAR OF HANDS

This is my number one favorite prose poems of all time and one of my favorite pieces all together. It is by Toronto born Robert Priest. I actually couldn't find this piece anywhere after reading it in highschool....... so Robert himself ended up emailing it to me. NO BIGGIE THERE. Enjoy :)

My father could bear no sign of what he called "arrogance" in me. Frequently and without warning he would slap me or punch me, shouting"get that bloody arrogant look off your face." Somewhere along the line I was eroded. I became for a time the grinning shit eater. Polite and, when alone with myself, dangerous.

I remember once, after having been wrongfully assaulted and sent to my bedroom, I was biting my lips, gnashing at the bedroom sheets in my rage, tearing up my own body in my fury, when suddenly the screen burst out of me "you prick!" And what a huge, bloody, raw throated holler it was. Not only did it seem to shake my own being but it must've also shaken the very foundations of our house. In the split second before I heard my father's ferocious "what!" I lay there with a surprised grin on my face, loving myself supremely.

Then the stampede started. My father burst into the room, his eyes nearly popping out with rage as he began to punch and wallop in a frenzy. I felt caught in the center of a storm. This mad berserker might kill me. After a time it stopped and all was silence. He went off, that man who is so much like me. He went off still full of rage and probably terror at what he might have done. He went off to his private place, raging and shaking and thinking who knows what tormented thoughts and left me there in the silence of myself.

My own rage was expressed. I had mollified myself with that scream. I could still believe in my own soul. What he felt he would have to tell you himself. I am no reader of closed books.

Now like a dagger my mind lunges into another memory and quivers there before me in dizzying reverberation. It is like a strobe light flash into a dark cubed room. My brother, my sister and I are there. We are small and helpless. I am grinning my sick lopsided grin. The vision that is flashed in on me, freeing us from the timeless stasis of forget is my father with a kitchen knife. He's standing with his belly thrust forward slicing and shining in the twilight like some kind of obscene Buddha. Poised above his belly gripped tight and trembling in his two hands is the knife. He's shaking with strange unknowable passion and there is in his eyes a look of desperation and --- and how shall I say it? Longing? There is a look in his eyes that still stares up from the bottom of my soul in dreams and yes, I will call it longing. I will call it fear and fury in desperate deprivation. He's showing us this look that is burning into us and branding us and shouting as the knife quivered in his grasp – "do you want me to? Do you want me to? And his voice --- it is as though twisted from an old rag. A warn imploring statue might grind out such avoice. An aging gray oak might talk in such a voice.

"Do you want me to? Do you want me to?" and we are saying nothing. Not daring to look at one another. Not daring because I'm thinking to myself, "well Gee dad, you know, it's up to you." And if I look up at my brother I might giggle.

"Ted!" My mother screams. "Ted!" And black opiate blood streams talent over the window, the house falls, time slants sideways and I am there and I am here and I am there and I am here.

ROBERT PRIEST