Inorganic.
Not grown – made.
Placed – and out of place.
Here – but not of here.
I am a hundred separate splinters scattered across a single flat plane,
each in the same different location.
I am a fundamental stasis.
Touch me: you cannot be stopped.
Caress the barnacles, fondle the lichens: I have been colonised.
They have made me their home.
I am smothered up to the neck –
the earth pressed against my back, the sea nestled against my chest –
trapped in an agony of incompletion – coward! Finish the job.
The air has tarnished my skin.
I long for somewhere darker
somewhere colder
somewhere slower
measured in geological time.
If I could choose, I would
sink
offered up to the dirt
and the brine.
I’d rather be
buried (the earth covers me completely)
drowned (the waters close over my head)
consumed, encased
an omnipresent
embrace.
Release me into the lithosphere.
Allow me to fossilise.
Perhaps I have bones after all
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