FireSoulPhoenix

Everest eats people:
The glacier cracks a hundred metres deep
gulp down the climbers that slip like flies
to the pitch white throat. It chews them down
then shits them out centuries later, still fresh, their flesh
just slightly mulched and brown.
Yet Himalaya's tourists convey themselves up pre-fixed ropes
wheezing thick air through gas masks
safely wrapped in North Face insulated clothes,
trudging upwards in procession; multitudinous droves.
K2 once shed a truck of rock where escalator-ropes
were hitched. Two dozen novice
mountaineers stranded in the death zone's hell:
One by one they chanced the cliff,
some lived, some froze, some fell.
All this waste to say
'I conquered the tallest mountains there to climb.'
By pulling hand over hand on rope, following a line.

I could never dream of English
rains that lashed the slabs of Cornish
paves, as a wild clawed cat paws
waves into boats onto rocks
unto death. Hear the slosh
slosh slosh of Mousehole harbour's
bathtub slop; see the gulls flying
backwards, the rainbows as warning
flags, the white horses blowing
up the cliff and over the heath,
taste the wind-nipped salt
drying on your lips. Once I felt
the lightning buzz before
it cleaved a nearby birch in two,
once saw the eye of Men-an-Tol
winking in the storm, and fish
jumping for their very lives
straight into the mouths of birds.
The sea is everywhere. It bites
at our ankles, gnaws at the crags
in cliffs until the whole world
tumbles into its steaming maw.
It rises and falls, rises and falls,
hailing into the flanks of miserable
animals on the storm-sodden tor.
Do they pine, as we do, for one
last breath of stagnant summer?

The summer I helped my dad clean out his garage had already been eventful. I'd fallen out of a tree, caught an admiral butterfly without a net and vehemently refused to wear the training bra my mother bought for me.
My dad's garage was the exact opposite of our family home. It was as if, over their married life, my mother had slowly relegated all of my father's prized possessions until the house no longer reminded her of the man he used to be. When my dad opened the swing door I was intrigued by the huge concrete weights that controlled the mechanism and it wasn’t until he had explained to me how they worked that I noticed the smell.
It was a smell reserved for that garage alone. A mix of the maggots he kept in the old fridge that sucked their way through rotting meat until he needed them for fishing and the machinery that bled orange and black mingled with old coats and hats and carpets.
There was no room for a car. There was no room at all. Every corner and wall was stuffed with

-
Yesterday,
the world paused mid-sentence and exhaled
stirring root and foundation from their purchase in its soil.
Streetlights dilated and quivered before they ceased,
heralding ruptured earth and derailed trains;
redrawing the city's map.
Tomorrow,
she'll sit with me in a spinal landscape
of fragmented towers and streets of tattered canvas.
She'll bask in a downpour of ash
beholden to a sky frayed at its edges
tinged with the colour of rust,
and whisper of severed tendons and megaton clouds,
until her lips turn blue.
Consciousness will evaporate between heartbeats,
and she'll look at me with the eyes of a timid kamikaze.
Tomorrow,
she means to destroy me
in the gentlest possible way.
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