"And now please welcome today's anti-terrorism speaker, Anonymous!"

[anonymous applause, dwindling out]

"Thanks, everyone. The reason I prefer anonymity should be self-evident, but just to make it clear, I wish to avoid the recrimination of the hostile element."

"Before I got here I was just reading, and believe me I'm still not believing, but it would seem, on the whole, that planetary aggression is on the slow."

A hand is raised
A hand is ignored
The speaker moistens his lips
Prepared to emit a bit more.

"I have stats and stories
Tortuous anecdotes about little girls and boys
Food and sanitation is a crime itself
And I'm prepared to say we live in our own hell."

Arms upheld wither down
As new hands reach for attention
But the speaker ignores them all
Intent on his own presentation.

"The reason for hate
Is more or less clear
We fiercely believe one thing
As they devoutly believe another.

But do not fear!
We are right and they are wrong
They saddle their own children with a death song
No cartoons of basic morality
Just legs with bombs
Made to go off remotely."

An angry rustle
Amidst lowered hands
Quieting now
Like they're getting the hang of it.

"Humans are robots
Programmable, malleable and sometimes trustworthy
Highly complicated machinery!
Indoctrination is the virus
That seeks to destroy the outside."

Again the raised hands
And eyebrows too
All these fluttering robots
Fluttering in a pseudo-free zoo.

Ignoring the obvious
The speaker plods onwards
But modulates his voice
Against their trained reactions.

"We need to accept and enfold
An ideology only thousands of years old
To mutate and twist
Into what our children might wish."

Someone yells "Disney!"
Another mutters "Black whiteys"
But there are a few
Who remain to hear it through.

"Despite what you think
Despite who you are
Against all you've been taught
We've come quite far.

You may not know your son
You may not know your daughter
But leave them alone
And tomorrow may happen.

Put the guns aside
Drink from your hidden bottles without shame
You are who you are
And you should let them be them."

This is not what anyone wanted
Anyone over the age of ten
This is not what anyone wanted
With children and the urge to brainwash them.

The room trickles out
Leaving the most devout
Devoted to the future
Any future left standing.

But amidst this group
Are hard-liner elements
And one has a voice
Cutting through it all
To ask, "What about bomber babies?"

And riding right on top
Is a fat slobbery Republican fop
Demanding in his self-entitled way
"What the **** about America?"

The speaker shrugs
As if to indicate
Which question
Is more stupid.

"We seek to leave the planet
And develop tech to make it happen
You go your way
And we go ours."

The room is smaller now
They indulge in eye contact
Personal communications
Words, hands, heads and eyebrows.

The speaker sighs
As if on the cusp of absolute honesty
Then spills his true guts
To these few radicals and emissaries:

"Our worst enemy is ourselves
Through millennia fashioning our own hells
Subjugation of non-prominent DNA
Believing destruction will pave the way.

But on a not-much larger scale
We're just cheap entertainment
For every other race
That crawled up this hill."

The crowd is slightly subdued
Probably more from shame
Than anything
Because shame is in the DNA
And experienced by everyone.

But we can always rely
On some fat Republican to decry
"But not me!
And for sure not my children!"

And now even more file out
Hearts emptied and minds afloat
Now it's just the sweating speaker
And a few odd haters.

"We're a microbial phenomenon
Miraculously still alive
And still inept
At staying alive."

He waves a casual hand like a maestro
And behind him the stage glows
A 30x30 screen descends
Illuminating bugs as they crawl.

"We're slightly smarter
But no more hardier
Than Hymenoptera
Except we can leave this planet."

Red-faced and obviously insulted
The old fat plushy storms out
Leaving now just a few
To adopt this future-flung view.

"We need to terraform and colonize
Sure, and design space suits
Pleasing to the eye
But ultimately,
We need to get the hell gone."

One clap, one frown
The speaker shrugs
As if wondering
Why aren't we all gone?

And so he is left
With the clean-up crew
And one fruitcake
Who asks
"Will God come with us?"

allow me to celebrate the ant
summer miscre-ant in my kitchen
picking up pieces of pieces "to go":
a crumb of Meow Mix, a crushed Cheerio;

applied the usual eco-safe spray
detecting this way too feint for they
amassed to quest their innate objective
exploring and toting the prime directive;

hymenoptera tents with doors
four on the floor: cafes of poison
for caulking the cracks in the walls hadn't solved
the stay-past-your-welcome guests involved;

soon numbers diminished but still a few
creeping through unrepent-ant
I swept thrice per day to starve them out
yet brooms are too thick all crannies to rout;

surrendered and wondered, perhaps they are teachers
attempting to bypass my brainy block
too thick to buzz with what the ants know?
I squat as a toddler to take-in their show;

for hours observing them (off and on)
until an implosion of comm-ants sense
challenged my globalized conception
exposing my mind to ant redemption;

the ant is now my writing totem
trouble though they'll be next June
within this mantra is what they knew:
one moment one crumb to carry and chew;

insight's relative I realize
ants have their own frustrations with size
but ponder the ant when writing time's little:
at peace with a piece of ant-agonist vittle.

Silent drone father
Never feeds the hive in life
Mates once-then eaten

Unfolding into itself, inviolable
in prosaic self-*******,
a boundless repertoire
of shape yearns forth surreptitiously
from inscrutable amniotes to claim
time as its own:

  Here a thicket
  of sycamores, there a baldaquin
    of pinnate branches, yonder
      a periphery of marigolds, below
        a cacophony of hyraxes, above
    the corpuscle of a lynx, the mid-flight
   jink of a darting swift and moribund
  crawl of a mollusk;

     Hymenoptera coaxing
     their haploid broods into teeming
     life as a cell of the swarm
         and viviparous apes cajoling
         suckling chimerae at the fathomless
         fountainhead of a rosy breast;

       Higher still,
       Cirrus cephalopods traversing
       the trench of sky, dandelions
       hitch-hiking the drift of a barren plains'
       wavering hum on cockchafers'
       forewings and a turbine's
       bombinating pulse, the chattering
       of roots ravenous for depth --

Jittering bangtails the hallowed echoes
of lascivious manes --

   inchoate sprout-hood the daedal
   nonage of towering evergreens --

      the plaintive shrift of elegiac
      redbreasts a goad to silent elation --

A likeness unlike
     (vocabularies of vertiginous blinds)
          (the eyes of ignorance closing)
             (the mouth of the mystery)
                that spurns the truth of tongues

                     is nature naturing.

It’s August here in New Zealand which means it is the middle of Winter. It rains almost every day here during winter.
Firewood piled outside the door is getting low so I earmarked two hours to barrow split wood from an auxiliary pile, stacked against the rear wall of the house, to the depleted pile, under cover of weather, at the house frontage.

The wood had been there for many months so it was full of spiders. Big spiders with brown chevrons on the back of their abdomen, Wolf spiders the locals call them, they can give you a nasty bite but they have insufficient venom to harm humanity. These spiders inhabit the underside of the split wood, they build silky white webs that resemble pouches. The webs catch inquisitive insects that search for food in the woodpile. The insects become entangled in the webs and the spiders pounce upon them and eat them. I saw plenty of evidence today of both the big spiders and what remains of their insect meals. Shells of the scarabs epidermis actually, all of the soft innards ****** out by the hungry spiders.

Also in the woodpile were several female Beech wasps, brightly colored little Hymenoptera with yellow and black banded stripes, with fearsome, sharp stingers protruding from the very end of the abdomen.  These wasps were not sheltering in the woodpile from the falling rain, they were hunting for the big Wolf spiders. Arachnids ten times their size and equally as combative as the hunting wasps.

Undeterred by size and ferocity the wasps attack the huge spiders without hesitation, Make no mistake, war is waged here for should the spider lance the wasp with its fangs the wasp will die an agonizing death, but if the wasp manages to deftly spear the spider with its stinger, a powerful venom will be injected into the spider immediately paralyzing it…..but the venom doesn’t actually **** the spider, it immobilizes it. The female wasp then penetrates the bulging abdomen of the Arachnid with her ovipositor and lays all of her eggs inside the paralyzed creature. Once egg laying is completed the female wasp disengages herself from the spider and flies away to die.

Almost immediately the wasp eggs hatch inside and the little white larvae begin to consume the living internals of the spider. They continue to eat the fresh edibles until they metamorphosize into young adult wasps which chew their way out of the, now dead, husk of spider and fly away to seek a mate which in turn, once fertilized, will ultimately hunt yet another unfortunate spider to host the fearsome hatchlings of her own busy brood.

As I stacked the wood in the front alcove I paused for a few moments to ponder the miracle of life and death enacted, unsuspectedly, in the battleground of my back woodpile….and marveled at the absolute drama of it all.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ
20 August 2023

vacancies for yellow jackets also available

alternately titled: eave'n roofs houses nidus

If ye dear reader find yourself
as an under appreciated
busy buddy buzzfeeding bee -
hive got just the solution.

When me and the misses
entered side door here
yesterday September 26th, 2021
where both of us live
within one bedroom unit
at Highland Manor Apartments,
we espied hexagon-shaped paper cells
constituting partially completed
reasonably priced
state of the art abode.

Nevertheless, these
myopic eyes of mine
identified when closeup
tiny sign advertising real estate
large enough to house me,
an average size bugaboo.

Yours truly itching to move
to cozier quarters
no matter facilities roofless
imposing long overdue necessity
to strip down trappings
to bare minimum.

Tricked out with state of the art wizardry
microscopic computer processing chips
adorn six identical geometric sides
indeed allowing, enabling and providing
global linkedin telecommunications
beamed in across
bajillion miles from deep space.

All kidding aside
Hymenoptera quite the builder
with innate abilities as their guide
neither prejudice, nor afflicted with pride.

Ever mindful of insects with diaphanous wings,
yours truly quite aware of pain regarding bee stings,
which commentary brings
me to recall the following incident when
quite so many years ago...

Mine eyes espied a glorious shade tree
on a recent brutally hazy,
hot and humid July summer day,
where below the gnarled roots
glazed occipital nerve did not see
yellow-jackets minding their own beeswax
when derriere i.e. did essay
until deux stingers re:
accessible bared skin
apiary members did flay
vulnerable hide bound
part of my right knee,

whereby toxin induced to feel
slightly queasy and appear ashen gray
yet possessed response
to stand up and immediately flee
as cohorts per hive stirred
with protruding stingers ready to lay
into another area of ripe human flesh
with consistency of brie
yet, no intent to be cheesy – nay
on the con tray or re:

only attempting to find good humor
to stave discomfort at bay
which quick thinking found me
summoning medicinal salve
to keep any potential swelling away
thus this mister mom trotted
into Belmont Hills lye bray r e
soaking damp washcloths
(I packed in plastic bag
to cool thyself) and pray

all the while mouthing expletives
more emphatic than oy vey
healing powers of self
would allow this chap to feel okay
enough until my then
thirteen-year-old youngest daughter
and tutor would sashay
out into the blistering heat
so we could be on our home bound way.

Black women love white women,               white,
pure amino acids, giraffes,   backsliding slippery
Brittany's beautiful backside landscape -
green and beautiful are the stars from the island,
the United States, the United States in the autumn
and the Orthodox Church 3 soldiers.
Gold and gold. A woman in the air. Hellas.
Changes in the Air Force. Nothing gold or yellow.
Old school on the football field,                             today in show business,
many of these children,                                and caused the manufacturers.
Russian legally accepted. Mark that the baby
was born,
and                       fed on coconut beef. Field 2:
                                        The book is a shower
of cancer and desserts,    Georgia Press in the Confederation of Africa;
great picture of Russian morning sky,
and remember,                    remember that it is in the nature of Britain.
Then the bishop of Arabia, and the child:
and passed from the camp. The ability to restore the body of a person
who consumes it decides to use the language
associated with the Eve merger under the boat.
The fruit rich in color, color and color of the disease
is the devil and the devil holds his hand.
A cup is like a dessert,           like a cup,
but let it smell like a man.
Waves of glory.                  Black women love white women,
white, pure amino acids, giraffe,
backsliding slippery Brittany's beautiful backside landscape -
green and beautiful stars on the island,
the United States, the United States in the autumn
and the Orthodox Church's 3 soldiers;          There is a woman
in the summer.   Her eyes yellow and white.
The word was funded by the most beautiful girls in the world.
July 9 lost.   I write stars in the mirror.
There is some cat food in a glass dish.
Eli ****** at the coffin door.
Igor makes the best dog in the sky.
This is power and capacity.           |I do not see Christ.
The girl's ear.          Of course, there is not much time.
This feeling is no obstacle to Einstein's Hymenoptera.
The shots of their mothers look bright like *****.
Hell is hell, the tomb,                               the memory of the colas.
Hi Hello Hi Hello.                              The female model in the US.
A lifetime. In ancient Greece,
in a balloon over the storms in hell.
Gold and a new wine.                        The world is very interesting.
Under the laws in Russia, began to.                                   1=1 you.
The golden ring I love you.                  A woman in the air. Hellas.
Changes in the Air Force.                       Nothing, gold and yellow.
Old school on the football field,   today's show business,
   many of these children's defects are caused the manufacturers.
Russian legally accepted.               Mark that the baby was born,
coconut beef.
                                      Then the bishop of Arabia and the child
passed from the camp
The ability to restore the body
of a person who consumes
it decides to use the language
associated with the       Evening merger on the boat.
Rich, rich in color, color
and color of the disease is the devil
and the devil holds his hand. A cup is like a desert,
like a cup, but leave it for one who likes the smell
of her Waves of glory.