Volcanic Ash

I know what being dead inside is.
Fossilized,
I've felt it every day.

Since he,
scattered his saurian footprints
across the landscape of ash left after my Paleozoic spews,
In this chest of heaving tectonics about to split the pangia of my molecules.

As for my ex-Mr. Meteorite, even God’ll tell you he
looked like oxygen.
Like bacteria’s last hope. Like the beginning of the end.
I watched him streak across the heavens.

His lights mesmerizing the sky with fire and star dust,
before the impact.
Since then? I’m still thrashing

in the shallows undecided
about flippers or thumbs. Lungs to fully breathe him in or swim bladders to collect his particles
safe from his sky...

Steadying my final writhing inch
to add to the seventy million years of coal beds a mile thick,
I gasp
And find only volcanic ash.