4D Deathstalker
Deathstalker of the Underworld: 4D
Desert, desert Quartz dusk,
Wind sifts the sand to silence.
I am yellow camouflage,
Skeleton-thin,
Feeling the world by tremor.
Newborns—scores—
Scale my back,
A living crest, I starve,
or kill and eat my lover
One whip of my tail
Unknits a man’s pulse,
And the desert keeps its hush.
Death, death, death
your merchants cried,
They libeled me Deathstalker—
A carnival name
To move me as crates
of danger.
They sold my venom as liquid fortune,
Yet the real treasury
Was hidden within it:
Four folded toxins—
Scylla, Charybdis,
Agitoxin, Chlorotoxin
Lock-picks for human nerves,
Breath, cancer and
Diabetes
My slender claws
Confess the trade-off I made:
Muscle for chemistry, Fists for fire.
Discover, discover,
Fear financed curiosity:
A dead child champion, Violet,
Olson, Hero,
Crowd funding oncologist
Painting child brains with my venom
They untied the four
Sulfur knots of chlorotoxin,
Spliced on a lantern dye;
Tumor paint, glowed emerald,
So scalpels could spare
What thinks, what speaks.
From my sting they learned
To hush pain itself,
Re-tuning the same keys
To mute the body’s alarm.
Pain, and
Deliverance,
Deliverance, society from junkies
deliverance For me and you.
Now coded yeast brew
My molecules for pocket change,
While antivenom labs
Still bleed horses
Old and new alchemies
Running in parallel lanes.
Deathstalker
I remain,
I remain in the dunes,
Ghost-blue, Under ultraviolet,
My four faces persist—
Mother, killer, key,
And unanswered questions,
Pivoting between
Human hurt and
human cures.
I am 4D,
I am the Deathstalker.
Deathstalker