I. The Fireflies
There was once
a time when the fireflies
had made a home out of me.
One evening,
long after the sun
had surrendered itself
to the hazed horizon
and the pregnant moon,
they had come to my window,
golden freckles of light
twinkling playfully
in the dimness.
What exactly
prompted their gravitation
towards me,
I will never be entirely certain of,
though I have my theories.
Maybe it was the
warm glass of milk
sitting on my bedside table.
Or maybe
they had simply mistaken
the peppers of stardust
laced atop my eyelashes
for their own kin.
Or perhaps–
and most likely–
it had been
the murmur of poetry
on my lips:
…watch how they dart about the trees
in whimsical harmony,
how they rise up towards the dark sky
in the hopes that, someday,
they too will become one with
the constellations that blink
so brilliantly in the blackness.
Yes,
Perhaps this what had captivated them so–
a homage to the fireflies themselves.
Perhaps this is
why they had drifted towards me,
as if in some fanciful trance,
weightless as paper lanterns.
And how sweet they were
as they twirled about the ringlets
in my hair and
nuzzled their small frames
against my cheek
and fingertips.
How sweet they were–
that is,
until the bees came.
II. The Bees
They made lightning bugs
of my fireflies,
whose soft luminescence was replaced
with a violent stream of sparks,
one resembling something close
to the bursting of a fluorescent bulb
And so came the lightning,
the firefly’s only defence against
the approaching swarm,
their only ammunition
in the impending battle:
fireflies versus
bees,
both in want
of my nectared
marrow.
But the lightning
was no reasonable match
for the bees,
with their
large, gelatinous figures
and the persistence
of their stabbings;
annihilated were the fireflies,
carcasses crumbling to soot,
their innards,
still glowing,
smeared across my collarbone
like war paint.
Victorious and
humming menacingly,
the bees then crawled
into my ears
and my mouth
where they proceeded
to feast on their spoils and plunders:
the honey,
that they so cruelly
stole from me.
And once the honey was gone,
so were the bees,
bellies full,
antennae sticky,
their use for me
fulfilled and therefore
discarded.
III. The Spiders
The final hosts
were drawn to
what the bees had left behind:
the inconsolable emptiness
of my being,
They marked their territory
with cobwebs–
spun carelessly
into my arteries
and windpipe.
Breath dwindling and
heartbeat diminishing
I tried to remember the fireflies–
the light–
as the arachnophobia
threatened to devour me.