There are beetles on my skin
Attacking my bark
With pincers sharp
-trying to get in

And as they cover me
Head to toe in a blanket of living death
They tickle in bitter giggles
At my senses, set ablaze
By their exo-skeletal steps

I do not build a scream
For the sound would die out in between
The sheet of beetles
And my trodden lips

Instead I lie still
Commanding them with my negligence
Fusing with their fear-mongering
They take my shape; I don’t take theirs
I am the alpha insect
The form of their nature
And now I stand
In beetled armor
A figure against the sun
My shadow raining over the undergrowth
Reigning over the under.

In this symbiosis we travel
Across valley and valley
Coleoptera-covered Rand McNally
Covering the earth, showing
The dominance of man
The man the man
He who holds the plan
In the palm of his life-colored hand

I am he
The guardian of land and sea
Infected with a voice-in-hand
Who writes eternity
Whose pen is the land filled with ink of the sea

And with beetles of lead
I harmonize
That between myself
And quaking skies
As the world shakes in its roots
During a spacequake
That bends our atoms like dried glue

But then I am not alone
And as I rest on grass of gold
The heroes step forth, dressed in animals
In a dark, ****** harmony
That is the nature of our home, our Terra
The brute beauty in black void
Swimming through time like a turtle
On which the souls of man rest
On golden grass
Our spherical nest

And our evils are justified
By the good of our pursuit of beauty
Though selfish maybe
Though hellish for he
That swims on land
But drowns as he walks the sea

We are multitudes.

We are Gaia, we are the mother tree
The ****** bliss of humanity
Dark and light, both are we.