There is magma in my blood.
Once released in ancient ocean, traded chemistry through time
Ionic process through Huronian Ice and Edicaran experiment,
Through Devonian Adventure and Permian Apocalypse.
We are born from distant dark water barely recalled
What gives life - a gift from a world made alien through time
Where the moon loomed larger and stars now dead lighting the night sky.
An environment I could neither recognise nor survive
And yet my form is constructed of its ghosts
When a fish first breathed air, when a worm grew a spine
When the alchemy of mantle and ocean granted Pneuma to proteins
Moments revealed in dead rock and trace chemistry
Invisible but for quirks of a planet that can only be experienced in hindsight.
Is my soul made of rock and ocean too?
I can see it reflected in the strange bodies of distant species
Intelligence emerging in spite of expectations from those that see themselves masters
And they come from the same underwater gasp as I
And yet I see it in abstractions of thought with unclear connections to biology
Distant time moulded my hands, my lungs, my face
Which time moulded my spirit?
I have seen your bones
Or perhaps not
I have seen resin
Cables holding your copy together
The Cartlidge gone
Recycled as life so many times.
I wonder if it remembers.
Your bones are in a drawer
Or on display an ocean apart
Or perhaps not.
Your bones are just another cast,
The earth granting you the blessing.
Another Life as Rock.
So one day before you are lost,
to wind or water or molten rock.
You may be witnessed.
I have seen your ghost
Or perhaps not.
I have seen a portrait.
An imagined moment in time.
These things happened to you?
Or something like it.
Violence and rest and play
Birth and connection and death.
Did it look like that though?
I once watched geese fight over rice and bread.
No real violence only bluster and noise.
And in a midst, a crow took the opportunity.
And flew off with the bread.
They were a lot like you in many ways.
What would you have done?
We know so much about you.
If not from you then from your family.
We have educated our guesses.
Life leaves it's traces, muscles leave scars,
Sometimes we can find feathers, skin, even colour,
Toothmarks and stomach contents and footprints
Faeces and eggs and embryos.
And yet and yet.
I have been thinking about you since I can remember.
Gazing in childlike awe and wonder.
I have seen your bones, your cast, your portraits.
I will never stop trying to see your ghost.
There is a picture of you on my desk.
Would you even recognise it?