Fossils

You keep kissing me and you keep not knowing that

You’re interchangeable. A Friday night. A light streak of bubbles and chapstick residue, crawling across my face.

We sprawl on the wrinkled face of sheets, the tired eyes of the striped black pillows blinking shut beneath our locked heads. A world turned sideways. A different plane altogether.

And here I am in the physical boldness of the font, the screaming act of action.

Here I am feeling myself apart from myself. Again. Criticizing myself. Again. Sitting up and above myself, the hesitant judge at the singer’s audition as her throat quivers and her fingers curl in landslides of sweat. As the thing, the only thing, she has stirred in the corners of her organs, the scales of voice and muscle, as it all pours out before her the wrong way.

By returning it, by the subtle pursing of my lips towards yours, I am trying to prove something of the weight of it all. I am trying to convince you to be unconvinced, to show you the secret before you’ve noticed the mystery.

But maybe if I spread it out, donate the sections of my head, maybe I could crush us all. So I shutthefuckup and I suck on your neck.

You keep smashing your canvas of skin into me and you keep not knowing that

we’re only fossils.

We’re only hollowed imitations of something alive. Intricate rivets of rock and bone and place and time. Wanting the wanting that has long left our bodies.

We are only fossils.

A presence derived from an unmitigated absence.