Hands familiar to the pressure of my exploring eyes.
Rendered innumerable times in smudged charcoal in my sketchbook.
The only subjects therein calm, obliged to hold still enough for a good drawing.

Only with eyes of razors do I see them crisscrossed with a maze of minute creases.
Creases that make up the back alleys and highways of a metropolis.
With an elastic mind can I wander down the lonely lanes.

I let my mind detach from my senses and drift into one of the living streets,
a road winding around the towering fleshy office blocks.
I get lost in the entwined creases of my own hand.

Just for a moment I tell myself, I will sit and rest.
Dropping onto the soft delicate ground,
and gaze up at a colossal, mind-numbingly tall, tiny hair,
quivering in a breath of air.

I sit and watch, tranquilly lost on the back of my own hand,
in a place utterly alien, yet intimately known by me.
My eyes droop, my spirit settles,
I feel the coursing current of the city's lifeblood pumping below me,

pulsing, thump! ... thump ... thump
My mind drifts into a dream within a dream.

And I sleep for ten million years.

When I wake the metropolis around me has aged.
The very street under my body has grown into an ancient canyon,
and the craters from bombs of primeval wars still scar the landscape.

I gaze straight upward for the first time,
and see my own face, old and withered,
like an apple doll half finished drying in the sun.

The face is mine.
And I am afraid of the face, because it is mine.
It is the face of a man who knows every mistake,
every horrible, regrettable thing I will ever do.

He knows the people I will hurt, the hearts I will break.
My soul is naked in front of this giant.
But then I realize, this gargantuan is nothing compared to me.
He doesn't regret the things I may one day do,
He regrets the things he has never done.

Well, I can still do them!
I can, I might, I will do everything he has ever wanted to.
It doesn't bother me that I will one day I will own these hands,
old and decrepit, these hands over which I wander.

By the time I own this old pair of hands,
I will be proud of the things these hands have done.