Life's Fall

How many years can a mountain exist,
before it is washed to the sea?

As a rock tumbles from its perch
atop a cliff into the water below,
impelled by gravitational acceleration,
it is potential transformed to kinetic,
object to process, noun to verb.
This crumbling topology
is the metaphoric substance of life - 
mountains thrust up
by Earth’s violent bowel
laboriously digesting its nickel/iron core
and ground down by wind and rain,
warped by spacetime - the ephemeral
thermodynamic erosion
of elevated electrons.

Biological water mills
capture density-dependent flow,
energy to turn their wheels