i'll never be a poet

wash your hands!

my mommy told me to wash my hands or else the dirt and germs and grime and worms (both earthern and microscopic) will end up in my waiting mouth, chubby sticky apple-juiced palms exploring the roof and walls and teeth and tongue tracing the sharp keratin undersurface of untrimmed nails, salted spongey meat encasing stubby bones that could snap in a bite like a kitkat bar. so i pump soap into my palms and rub them together and sing the alphabet- A B C D E F G, H I J K- and then i stop because i don't like how they squashed L and M and N and O and P together into throttled semiquavers like a tongue-twister meant to asthmatically take your breath away; they had already set up the first few letters against a slow and steady pulse and then shoved the train for it just to rhyme the K with the P and Kay, Please understand that the alphabet could easily have been reordered to achieve your perfect rhyme scheme in each octameter! i think about how the alphabet is a failed piece of aural literature and i scrub my palms together like i am spinning a stick on a log to create a spark like they do in the movies and my lubricated palms no longer smell of antibacterial mint but smell like a barbecue, where my palms have rubbed all the bubbles away and generated rubbery friction, red silicone opening up hairline rips with each violent pass. my biceps tremble as my palms spasm back and forth against each other- never miss a beat never miss a beat never miss a beat and i am sure if i vibrate even harder the molecules will phase into one another and the milky soap will seep into my bloodstream and cleanse my hands from the inside out, hollowing out finger bones and power-hosing muscle tissue, they will re-emerge from my pores in ivory-tusk foam noodles and my black blood will be as white as snow. but i hear marimba tinkles going clickety-clackety-clickety-clackety so i look down and see my sink is dyed a dark, dark crimson, a pair of gloves made of skin floating in the middle of a goopy meat porridge where my flesh has all melted off and all that remains are my bones scuffing against each other, dribbles of miniscule bubbles ebbing from between my finger-bones. now i have made an even bigger mess of the sink, mommy won't like that, i have to wash both the sink and my hands so i guess i will start over. A B C D E F G, H I J K- no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no where is the sink? where are my hands? i have to wash them or else i can't put them in my mouth. i can't sing the alphabet properly because it is wrong. i can't see the sink- i see fisheye versions of my bulbous nose multiplied a million times in soapy rainbow refractions and the bubbles press against my eyeballs and prick them with their antibacterial properties and i yell A B C D E F G and they pop, fireworks of liquid dust drizzling on my bathroom floor coated in a lube of blood in water and i slip and my head dips down and takes the first impact and my soapy watering eyeballs roll up behind my eyelids so i don't have to see any more of this mess i have made. i hope that when i wake up my head is fixed and when mommy tells me to wash my hands i am not compelled to scrub them to the bone, i let the milk glide over my skin and gently rinse the dirt off, healing tonic like a second skin leaving nanoscopic, deodorising flora blooming in the pores of my hands in its wake. and then i can put my hands in my mouth like a good clean girl and mommy will love me and praise me for being such a good keeper of hygiene!