Vertebra

It rides through your flesh like a snake in search of something in the middle of the night. Like a winding stairs that holds your head from your heart. I climb all those blocks of bone with my fingers as if my hand were a spider making its way to some safe haven over rocky steps of flesh.

That thing would kill you in the night. As if it were some problematic motorway through your body that you hadn’t designed. No one had given you the road map. In fact I was the only one who had journeyed down that path with my fingers saddled next to my thumb. It kept you together yet it caused you pain. It created hell for you but allowed you to keep moving. It was a physiological bridge that no one but me could walk down. My fingers and my eyes were jealous over whoever may have walked that route before. I’ve tried furtively to own your back with kisses but tenderness wont get me a passport into the feelings that crawl amongst the sea under that bridge. I’m in the same room as this house of ligaments but I still don’t know what it is that animates them into moving every day. I’m wondering all the time what goes through your mind and through your bones when you’re excited, what feelings are propelling you? What is that motivates you to get your spine moving and go running? The more pain that snake causes the more you seem intent on wanting to move its nest.

I sometimes wonder if in a thousand years if archaeologists were to find your body trapped and frozen in ice that had survived some second ice age what they would make of you? What would they do once they had dug you out of that hulk of ice? What would the twisted vertebra tell them about you? Would it say something about your own personal neurosis you tried to run off every morning or would they take it as a sign of the twisted qualities of mankind in general? Would they make a killing and display you for children to come and gawk at some ancient human prize. What will the children of the future make our little human ways? Will we horrify them like some are frightened of the ways of the medieval, will we appear medieval to them, or will our back aches be a source of nostalgia for something they never experienced? Will they still have love or will that be too costly for them to afford? I can see those future archaeologists seeing your tattoo glowing black through the ice as the frozen box melts in the future sunlight.