Orogenies, when there, love to rend the sky,
It festers above and below, a gaping kiss
An igneous, crumbling, shepherd's pie.
Where I stand, ground roils over abyss
And the horizon shrieks out a unicorn's head
I can hear the soil rasp, a hungered hiss.
And it says, through the black and the red
"Listen, child, to my jagged, dazed pangs
The paeans of a solitary, stratified bed."
Little needles of rock unstitch, like fangs
Biting the faux-apple red of the clay
A ravenous trench wide beneath me hangs.
The mountain speaks like an alleyway
"We are Basquiat in exile, hungers of trees
The world is scarce but what we cast away.
The supernal swing is our grand trapeze
We are Orpheus on methemphetamine
Our tapestry is the almighty's frieze.
We've churned through games of king and queen
And long before the plague of your kind
We made what you now probe and call marine.
And yet there's something curious we find
A human folly that you're meant to last
Weak on this plane are your ties that bind.
Your monuments and spires of distant past
Will be swallowed into my gaping maw
For I, the Earth, am the iconoclast."
