I like feet. I like bodies. I was lazily thinking in the small hours about the feel of skin and what a massage therapist had once said to me about how it feels to touch and stroke and rub into the skins and flesh and muscles of many people… backs, shoulders, arms, chest, buttocks, legs, hands, cheeks and feet. It occurred to me that I almost never touch the skins of people, other than their hands. If they are not my most loved ones, I rarely touch another human – almost never.
She, my once lover, was a massage therapist for a while and the mother of our children (always), described the bodies of younger people, smooth and firm and how it feels compared to that of older people.. like the softest, smoothest leather, over bones and tendons – the textures of the body beneath. And about harder, rougher skin, scars, and hairs – how they move and respond to the sliding and pressing of the massaging strokes. There was nothing but interest and curiosity and awareness of it all – I felt my joy was greater than hers. She is a visual person, touch was extra, but not perhaps so much ..
Me, I bury my hands in the sand and swim in the cold sea water and the air and the sun and the rain and the pebbles on my naked skin and .. I am indistinguishable from everything.
I wasn’t sure about that, not back then. Then I was squeamish about other bodies, bodies other than her’s and those of our soft, plump skinned, children.
It is a tenderness and joining of humans that I’ve really not experienced. The joy of touch is often so lost to us, restricted, understandably, as an outcome of those who seek to touch, to take, in unwelcome ways. People seek power and to take it from those who, understandably, seek to hold onto it – where is the pleasure in taking what is not given, I don’t know.
Sometimes we humans touch inadvertently; the brush of another human’s naked forearm while crushed together on the Tube – I pull back, recoiling in fears that our accidental shared moment of joining might seem an intentional act of taking… soft skin, or the feel of body hair that I am not used to, I’ve never caressed an especially hairy arm or leg… mmm but to lay semi asleep, face resting on warm belly and soft pubes, the warmth and smell of skin, bodies, the taste of .. moments though, a nurse who for once, ungloved, held my bare forearm to comfort me as was in extreme pain, her basic, human, love flowed between us, she undiminished, me filled.
I imagine our skins are smooth partly because, as we touch and we are touched, the sensation can be the deepest bliss – it is surely not simply coincidental, a mere response to an environment at some point when we lived in warm climates – the touch joined us, shared our love and connectedness through a human poetry of touch where words, or a photograph can only say so much.
Over the smoother areas, or where there is hair, the nerves transmit a sharing of bliss – I Will it to pass from me to you, through touch, I Will for you to feel as directly as I share it, love and joy and strength, as I Will it to pass through space to you now though with words, it is only a best estimation – know it when I say it, touched.
Sometimes we friends hold hands, holding legs and arms as we pass through from now into, and through, and throughout other worlds and we meld into beings and non-beings and where we start and where we end seem like strange illusions… all points touch, we are no longer parts A and B, binaries, we are all obviously all; all parts connected and expanding, touched, not just entwined, all points as ..
I caress my loved one’s skin, thinner than it will have been in the decades before I met her – I wish I had met her sooner; I am so delighted that we met.. chances of lifetimes.
Both of our skins wrinkle as we pass our hands over each other’s skin’s – older skins, so soft, the finest, softest leathers, warm, and smooth, and worn thiner with life and love and all that we have been and become and will be. To be naked in your arms, to spoon as we fall into sleep.
Our hands and feet, we kiss them and stroke them and with my feet I chase the last of another Saturday’s sun up the wall.
Phil Pool - Art and Protest 