call me mountain-boy & walk me 1143.61 meters deep.
there's a train somewhere but the body responds
better skin-to-skin. tracks running away from us 
on the nimble-legs of the tahr, it's eyes plucked
from goat faces-- hooves cracking off & becoming
stones. you ask me how far we can fall from &
i find you a tunnel through the mountain where
plummeting is a horizontal action.
the longest tunnel through the Himalayas comes
right after Barog station. named after the
British general whose ghost hide's its face
in a shroud of fog & engine smoke. as they
dug the tunnel from both sides, no matter how
deep  they could not make the sides connect.
i take my shovel & you take yours:
disrupt the body god & go deeper. i see the teams
of men alone as the darkness makes itself
vaster to mock the human drive of exploration:
within the rocks an infinite distance-- the hiding
place of the night sky when it folds up
like a chess board  at first sight of the sun.
the general wept when the news came--
that there was no way all the way through 
the mountain. you slip your tongue
in my mouth as if there's another side 
you're going to reach in me. is this
us giving into the illusions of our muscles,
that somehow we could make a railway of each other.
i don't want that from you, i do, however
want to find the bones of the general--
his gun shot from within the darkness
making a wrinkled face of the stone, horse
wild and shrieking as he slumped 
to the cavern floor. the hooves keep 
pounding forward & i try to catch them
to show you what my heart feels like
falling horizontally. are you there still
on the other side of the cliff? shovel
under your tongue? the generals bones 
proliferating the tunnel into a rib cage
for us both to climb into, talking by the 
that leaks in between the window blinds.