deathless

I am a rock. Heavier than god and movable as earth itself. I orbit around something beyond sight and do nothing else. I sit and wait. I dream. Water falls on me, trickles into my pores. I want arms and legs but I was not made an animal. I am less of a circle and more of a fat bottomed lump with soft peaks and a top that reaches towards the sky. I live on crooked ground that covers me. How much you can’t see. I watch the world around me freeze and thaw cyclically in perpetuatum. I feel it, too, and it feels nice. My face bakes and burns under the summer sun, my bottom stays a damp shadow. Winter ice molds to my ridges like a second skin, hard as me. Adornment. Ice melts, water slides down my sides in rivulets and I am dark under its wetness. I want to kiss but I was not made with lips. I can be kissed, but I can’t do it back. I am a receiver of the universe. I act on nothing. I stay. I am. I am one billion years old and perfectly formed. I am the exact perfect shape for what I am. I have no family. I am both my own mother and my own child. I am endless. I am unkillable. I can’t ride a bike. Moss grows on me gently and slowly, and I buzz, imperceptibly. I feel the buzzing of everything around me. There is buzzing on all sides for hundreds of miles. I move, incrementally, since the dawn of time. Bugs crawl over and tickle me. They eat, lay eggs, and die on me. Fat and bright leaves block the hot sky. Humans visit. I scrape them and their skin bleeds, barely. I’m not young enough to cut deep. I’m weathered. I don’t know what it means to work and I cannot be tricked. I cannot be fooled. I want to kiss. It gets cold again. The leaves dry out and blanket me in their death. I watch stars from my place in the dirt. There’s parts of me and parts of them that have the same memories. I’m a permanent thing but I can change. I have burn marks and missing parts. Softened edges. I am deathless. Never ending. Heavy as the forest and old as the stars. Butterfly. A butterfly, dry, warm, and lighter than the wind floats over for respite. Its wings flutter against me until it falls to sleep on my face.