Up lazy hands, where have you been wandering
Off to? You should be stained with coiling rainbows or
At least black charcoal's pitch; you should be dripping
With the ruddy gum of blood, dried green,
Festered with pustulating sores.

Perhaps yet there is a time for the blue,
Whether you mean meridian oceans just frothing at the teeth
Of sailors or the stained alabaster sails by the tails
Of Java. Have you drained brown rice and sifted
Fine barley, fingers? Parchment, wrecked and yellow, bleeding
Over with blue ink, the juice-stained leaks
Of crushed chrysanthema and violets? -- For shame! Scat,
Piano long, stop pounding the minors or catching the rills
Of a flute (stop waving in trills). If you haven't touched
Her undergarments yet, if you haven't mixed a sharp nail
With the quail of pleasure or traced a soft little wail
On her ass-puckered lips, then it's time to knead harder
At rock; it's time to stroke metal into silver dynamite,
But everything must become something, hands!

Have you ever observed the way the night
Scatters across the lawn like so many cats, or the exact
Number of wrinkles summer Petunias fold in their jowls
When they mow? Or tell me if the concrete is cracked
Into numerous pebbles beneath her feet, whether the twilight
Really touches quivering lips, either pressed in vulvulating joys
Or climbing the heights that spiral cerebella
In indigo darkness. Of course there are people
Painting these things!

Hands, I want you to dip yourselves in the muck,
Hands, to sell pounds of your mottled flesh
In Arabic or at least at CostCo.; and if there aren't enough sins
To script the strong number of the beast or at least
Long volumes of crystal speech sweating out perfumes of finger oil
About the world -- well then away with you, hands, away.