npm2020: poetry videos day 9 "Inventing the Tactoscope"

My National Poetry Month Project 2020 is to record a short video each day in April, presenting my published poems to poetry lovers of all ages.

Today's is a poem of imagination, in which I invent a whole new technology for seeking out those tiny spots of yard or skin that somehow have never been touched...

Inventing the Tactoscope Somewhere in my yard there’s a spot, a spot the size of a flickering thought, where no one’s foot has ever walked. Somewhere on my skin there’s an inch, an inch the size of a tiny pink pinch, where no one’s hand has ever touched. I imagine a tool that lets me see the empty cool of those deserted places, that lets me sink with one warm toe into that lonely spot of yard; that lets me lay a fingertip onto that chilly inch of skin. I imagine a tool called a tactoscope.