Turbulent clouds, calculating rancor to best confound me,
appease the gods enough to bring a white-wine colored rain
lapping at my cabin door high in the Rockies these days.

Evergreens don't grow up here much; it's too high for them,
stark and cold, but easy to glance a wolf silhouetted on the 
far peaks at night.  Full moon, daisy of the night time sky, 
rustles bats from their coffin cliffs, coyotes from their hidden
other worldly dens where they and snakes and spiders dwell.

Mine is a solitary life here, cynical hideout from society, sanity
temporary in its permanence, though permanently shifting, the
high cold winds forever rearranging lives all day, all night, everyday, 
every night.  The mountains themselves ask why.  

Aspen carpets their locks and lashes, granite dimples their cold
manly cheekbones.  Rough harsh threatening words they speak 
always chanting, taunting me with their flecks of golden silver 
twinkling, fake, ostentatious like a poker-playing miner's best
hack: bluffed, boasted, hiding yet belying a worthless hand. 

Almost as irrelevant as those damn tourist cowboys for whom
X always marks the spot on a treasure map back home to hell.