The Fingers Became Trees

Lyrics

The sky is a closing eyelid, silver and smooth.
The walls of the dream are getting closer.
A shadow falls, but the shadow is the shape of a hand.
It descends like a five-towered cathedral of bone.
Each finger a corridor without an exit.
The knuckles are polished mirrors showing a room I haven't been born in yet.
The dream compresses, the air turns to glass.
The lines on the palm are a labyrinth, and I am the only traveler.
It wants to make a fist and keep me like a secret.
I push back.
Both palms against the closing world.
And the fingers... the fingers become trees.
Porcelain cracks into bark.
The thumb, a spire of ancient redwood.
The index, a silver birch writing its name on the non-sky.
The closing stops. The growing starts.
I am climbing the little finger, the one that promised.
The bark is warm, patterned like a circuit board.
Inside a knot of wood, an eye opens and shows me a spiral staircase. I ignore it.
You look down and see the dream you just left, held safely in the palm below.
A new gravity pulls you upward, toward the fingertip which is also a moon.
I need to be sure. I stop climbing.
I hold up my own hands to check the count.
The left had seven fingers, the right was just a reflection of the climbing.
I counted again, the left hand was a map, the right hand was Wednesday.
The check fails. The tree is real. My hands are not.
So I push back again, against my own skin this time.
Both palms flat against the bark that was a finger.
And the world... the world becomes the view.
Bone gives way to branching logic.
The closing fist becomes an open invitation.
The prison becomes the watchtower.
From the top, I see it all.
Every place I ever wanted to escape to.
There is the silver library whose books index the sky.
There is the station of slowing clocks.
There is the apartment where I forgave a younger me.
All laid out on the palm of the hand that tried to hold me.
It is a map made from its own cage.