Murder Mountain

Your birth was a rabid affair,
Waxy petrifaction. A panicked scattering
Of tectonics and slow burning screams
Unfurled the miracle to an unpeopled earth.
It was more than the dawn could bear,
To hold you; your flagrant ambition
Till from the rim of fledgling eyes
The firmament's curve, the sun's far side.

You have herded your isolation.
A single dissident orchid. An exile
Prized from the hissing Karakoram.
Three miles down every shadow
Bears your weight, an unblinking deity.
Silence stuns the Hunza
Its sons do well to hold their tongues.

So many men have come.
A weary, rag-tag bunch
Of hot-shot dreams, fleshy accoutrements
All wrapped up in the spider's weave
Lives staked out on dioxide smiles
And how you laugh!
Perhaps they do not understand
For all things must end here.
Their insect fates soon sealed
When death scores every cleft
With its five bar gates.

All this is left -
Your carnivorous shrug
A casting off of hoops
Dust, in the evening's remembrance.