F

Sometimes most days almost always
When I
Scrounging stuck in traffic
Unknown mayflies driving the cars around
Insectoid feelers grasping the wheel
When I
Bones of lava boiling over
Teeth everywhere and pointy
I hypothesize:

A mass extinction event or
A pandemic colony collapse
Wouldn't be
Too bad

I’m an immature insectoid in a *** void
a walking stick wandering annoyed
looking for a hole to burrow in
escaping the cold is a win.

I connected through love
we connected through ***
you connected your shoves
through physicality and texts.

I held your thorax
through all the attacks
through the dotted tracks
until the **** started to stack.

I thought you were Don Cheadle
but you’re just a dung beetle
preying on the dumb feeble
putting a ****** needle
on the stinger of Weedle.

Parasite envelopment
Isn’t good for development
so I decide to stay celibate
and not ***** for the hell of it.

Detaching my proboscis
makes me sad I’ve lost this
but the aroma made me noxious
and your insect bites are not missed.

I once read a story about an ant
who set his mind to move a mountain.
An insect, a millimeter from jaw to legtip,
laboring against a mass of stone and
soil quadrillions of times his size.
But he worked
and worked
and worked
moving the bedrock one dram at a time,
year after year, season after season,
each trip melding into the next in an
endless march of mindless labor, until
where the mountain once stood,
a peaceful valley sank down. All because
of the labor of one very determined insect.

At the end of the fable, the writer tells us
never to give up, for what we choose
to work and persevere towards
will surely happen if we truly try.
As I read the story, I knew he was right.
Never give up.
Even if it takes a quadrillion trips,
1,000,000,000,000,000 trials,
before the mountain bows to you.
Even if your small, insectoid mind
cracks like a candy-cane under a sandbag,
even if you collapse and die after 6 decades
of exhaustion, millions more left to go.
Never give up.
Even if your task is impossible, and it
destroys your life, everything you love,
everything that makes your little ant-soul tick.
Never give up.

Dead bodies always have drawn flies
but perhaps one day
they won't
instead of flesh
for the insectoid feast
it will be steel
robot wars
no bloodshed needed
or maybe we'll have
world peace
I only jest
robot war will be
our reward for avoiding
extinction at an earlier date
if we're lucky.

terracotta jawbone hinges
grimacing insectoid mouthparts
cheeks of ivory
and a copper brow
with two ebony sockets for eyes
and an olive branch in its mandible

on the left-
one glorious black seraphim wing extends
casting a shadow as long as the bible

its right hand-
crooks a finger beckoning an emptied palm
the sound of an invisible coin pinging on the floor

as the pigs mill
between indolence and furor
their schism adheres to unspoken tenets

and it goes on
and it goes on
and it goes on

Crawling sickness becomes coagulated insectoid
Writhing within hive-mind funnels,
Constructing ambivalent torture of humanity merging together,
Congregating the organs amidst shadows of arachnid dread.

Instigation copulation with the father of crawling dread;
He who copulated with the remnants of the Godhead and penetrated cybernetic robotnoid.
Robotnoid:
He who rises from silk-woven robotnoid— crawling robotnoid.

insectoid eyes peer down the rabbit hole
there are infinite choices but one ending
we all know that whatever you chose, it.