Skull

In the quiet shell of the dead
the skull sits— a pale cathedral,
stones of a stone‑stone kingdom,
its vaults the only vault that holds a mind.

Its arches stretch like cathedral spires,
measured by the lines that have taken
their time to carve an ending for the tongue:
a cryptic hinge for the nervous system’s song.

The eye‑holes stare back like twin black moons,
beyond the hollow glass of memory,
where light dies slow, leaving faint echoes
of the colours once painted upon the iris.

In the cradle of the maxilla there lies a spill
of cartilage, once bright, now a gentle,
CC‑faded stroke— a testament
to the fleeting flash of life’s own fire.

We, with our noses, glance at fossils of us,
shocked by how our bones still rise, and fall;
in the crown, the serotonin‑rich bone sits,
as it once kept our thoughts from wanting
to crane their necks for a beat of light.

The skull is a coarse map, a silent map;
It marks the contours of our vanished selves,
We trace its lines with fingertips,
And in each groove feel the weight of time.

The skull is, after all, the only thing
that remembers our earliest days,
And with each three‑dimensional curve,
We find poetry in the quiet shape of bone.

It harks to our shared fate— a silent barometer,
its quiet silence speaking words:
we die, but in those bones we live again,
through the endless geometry of the skull.