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Robert Potter

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Fingerprints

Sloughing through the treadmill
Of dark reflexive landscapes
Identification: I need to walk these lanes
Spiralled and embraced by the human technique
Stepping deeper in my soiled tracks
Yet damned before I start - fist unfolded
Anger ready to call the heavens down
Mutated by the blind god at my back.

A mortal wanderer within the giants maze
Dwarfed in furrows of self-knowledge
Confusions fill me to the brim
Flooding through these fingerprints.
No surprises any more
I know this nowhere where I dwell.
So like these black bands
The fingerprint becomes my mausoleum

Yet vital to the broken personality
In concrete abstract of a drear topography;
A map which moulds and binds my stars
Extinguishing opportunity like a twenty-first birthday cake.
In the freedom of the fingerprint
Names call out within the labyrinth
I need to know who has my identity
And walks these secret finger maps?

I need these fingerprints
To value my uncertainty
Just to know that where I am
I am always who?
Fingerprints should say this
And where you should go
And what you should be needing
And the causes to be fighting for

And who would you be
If your ‘prints didn’t know?
And what would they know
If your ‘prints were burned away?
But which one is me?
I challenge these hands to tell,
Which one is me?

 

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