POETRY: Fossils of a human heart

I shed dead skin in a trail of diary

entries and old poems, snaking

through my life’s path – the

fossils of the human heart,

footprints, preserved in stone.

I watched the slow extinction of a past

girl – each leaf dropping eventually,

though new ones will grow. I read the

things she wrote and it’s peculiar – how

much she isn’t me.

The air smells fresh outside, it’s been

raining today – a comforting white noise,

but I don’t have you here to put your

head on my shoulder, and tell me about

now things

that keep me grounded here. So my

mind takes a walk, a hopscotch, along

my stepping stone leaves or stepping

stone petals – my trail of past things

that fell from past me.

There are still pieces of her, new

owners grow from old roots. But she

was fading, waning, I knew, when I

stopped writing about him and

started writing about you.

This piece was originally published in Edition 36 of Verse. View it in its original PDF form via ISSUU.