You are a weight sitting just above my collar bone, creeping over my shoulders and radiating down my back. Your tail slides down my spine and slaps against it occasionally.

Camouflaged within my vertebrae, you still remain extinct.

There’s no mistaking it when you slide beneath my lumbar; stubborn little penetrator.

Hiding within me, you settle into the places you like best.

You cause me to ache.

Dinosaur, I still miss you.

Do you remember late one night, at a house beside the beach, you called my mobile phone (those things will be extinct one day too) and you pretended to be out of sight in some place far away. You whispered to me until I ached for you (deeper) and then you knocked on the door with a thump, thump, thump of your tail.

You always were full of surprises.

The most beautiful of creatures.

That night, I stepped back from the doorway and jumped into your arms; you carried me down the hallway and into that place again.

We created something that hour, when the moon was low and the tide settled. A little bit of tenderness and a definite amount of appetence seeped into my bones, causing me to never forget you.

You crawled under my skin and settled within; an artifact.

You’re gone now, though there are traces of you everywhere within me and all of the time, space and evolution of my self never hides the fossil that continually resurfaces.

I don’t go searching for you; I stumble across you on the oddest of days whilst I’m walking through the yesterdays on route to tomorrow. Those footsteps are obstinate and my feet have grown since I last stood there, but it still feels strangely comfortable.

I will fade away one day and my crumbling bones will settle into the earth, my own relic of the life I have lived. Someone, in some place will feel me pressing in and underneath their shoulder blades, with an ache of lust and love and could’ve been desire, but it probably won’t be you.

It rarely works that way.

Admiration of such a beast is only one sided. A major attraction at a museum. Something to reminisce and wonder about.

You are my dinosaur.

© ryan