4D Deathstalker
4D: Deathstalker of the underworld, libeled tumor lantern
The deathstalker (Leiurus hebraeus), also known as the Israeli yellow scorpion, is a highly venomous arachnid of arid Middle Eastern and North African deserts, armed with one of the most potent neurotoxins in the scorpion world—capable of killing vulnerable humans yet harboring chlorotoxin, a peptide that glows under ultraviolet light and shows promise in illuminating brain tumors for surgical precision.
Under blacklight, its exoskeleton unveils a ghostly hyaline blue fluorescence—a hidden tumor-lantern revealing the duality of killer and key, poison and potential cure—while it stalks quartz dunes with skeletal grace, raising its aculeus-tipped tail in alchemical threat across the starlit sand.
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
This is the 4th animal in the memory music project.