Who Polices the Policer's Heart

Lyrics

Labuche Kang the Third.
Never summited.
Until now.
And what I found... was not a flag.
Just this.

She walks the lane, they call her Rebellious Rachel.
A joke, of course.
She is the lane's memory. The lane's conscience.
With her little book.
She notes the garbage left out too late.
The boy who spits on the paving stones.
The volume of a radio after ten.
Every small tear in the fabric of the day, she mends with a sharp look.
A quiet word. A mark in her ledger.

But who polices the policer?
Who watches the watcher's heart?
When she climbs to a place with no air, no neighbors, no gods...
What names does she write in the dark?
On a mountain that has no master,
who keeps the accounts?

I turn the page. The paper cracks with cold.
Her script is tight, a wire pulled taut.
Not transgressions against the public good.
These are debts of the heart.
"Sun Lin, for the compliment on my daughter's dress, but the look in your eye. May 1988."
"Doctor Feng, for saying it was 'just age' when my husband coughed up blood. December 2003."
A list of every slight, every un-avenged wound.
A lifetime of keeping score.
The poison she brews, just for one.

And who polices the policer?
Who watches the watcher's heart?
When she climbs to a place with no air, no neighbors, no gods...
What names does she write in the dark?
On a mountain that has no master,
who keeps the accounts?

She must have carried it here herself.
Or paid someone.
Past the juniper smoke, into the silence.
To leave the rage at 7,000 meters.
Where no one could read it.
Where the judgment is pure ice and wind.
A place as unforgiving as her own memory.
She left her truest self on an unclimbed peak.

The ink is frozen.
The names are locked in ice.
Rebellious Rachel.
Her rebellion was this:
She never forgave a thing.
And who polices that?