Inverse Erosion

2032

They sold the sky for pennies,
The miracle turned cheap, intelligence just a draft.
Up there, everything slides, drifts, trades.
But here, in this room, gravity hasn’t lost an ounce.

I no longer watch the horizon, I watch my hands.
They have aged. They have held.
The belly did not heal, it ceased to be an insult.
It became the meat-clock,
Beating the rhythm of a time machines ignore:
The cost of time.

Aurore is here, turned to bark.
She no longer says she is tired,
She has become the house’s standing timber.
You don’t move an oak because it leans,
You sit against it and thank the shade.

The children cross the screen like crossing the street,
Indifferent to the prodigy, looking only for the gaze.
They know the silicon god always answers,
But they come to the father to know if the silence is real.

So I dig.
Not to escape, not to strike gold.
I dig because it is the only way left.
Scraping away the dirt of “I should have,”
Clearing the stones of “tomorrow,”
Wiping off the dust of “why.”

I claw at what remains of the instant.
It is hard. It is cold. It is there.
It promises nothing. It saves from nothing.
But when the shovel hits the floor of the pit,
The sound is pure.

It is the bone.
Mine. Ours.
White as truth stripped of meat.
I stopped wanting to fly the day I understood
That the treasure was never freedom,
But the density of the constraint.

Everything changed.
Nothing moved.
We are here.