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Notes About The Poem

This poem is an analogy from the truism "drawn like a moth to a flame". The saying suggests curiosity can be deadly. Hopefully, the poem goes a bit deeper. In the final stanza, the speaker asks "is everything 'wings and burning flame', an existential game of zero-sum. If so what is the need the moth, and maybe us all, to want to explore. Is there design in this? From a compositional point of view, I am proud of the introduction. What is a moth? I only know through shadows (Plato's cave). Then existance is established through not being, missing moth, missing fabric in clothes. What sculptors call "negative space".

A Moth

What is a moth?
I only know flitting shadows
Magnified upon my wall.

In closets and in chests of drawers, 
Despite balls that smell of hospitals,
Holes in clothes where they once were.

They dance around my lantern
Made by Coleman, forest green,
To a deep sea diver breathing kerosene.

They’re drawn to candles too.
One misses a beat 
And in diaphanous tragedy

Falls to my table top,
A crushed, tropical cocktail umbrella, 
Match sticks and news paper mâché. 

Its carcass dusts
My hand with mica shininess
As soft as talc.

If everything is wings
And flame, what need
Does this one insect feed?

analogyfree verse

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