Cockroach

Across the white of table bread and yellow plated cheese Upon the black fictitious grapes, it wheezes its disease It crawls, its scrawny legs cluttering the revulsion's sight Look at this nocturnal insect parading pride in pallid light And so one, then suddenly a thousand more, and still more From draw I thought secured, from every vessel held in store The little beasts come dragging a gay appetite to the floor And with so much resilience, so much flare, some would adore But I, something in the hygiene of my upbringing, shudders me With looming tragedy for this, a population depleted I see By pest and pestilential tolerance, trembles me now with rage That cockroach could destroy us, and rule the coming age. Mutating from the fission and fusion that left us hopeless, bare The fallout from divine grace, and this shimmering cold now here What shall be our harvest, except the wintry white of fear Nothing saps their resistance now, the cockroach is everywhere Profile this, in every four thousand species plus, every size and shape Four common species threatens our mortal dust, O wanton rape Think you that their triumph shall not call from hell more tragic forms To chew and shred and intoxicate the procreation of our norms I hear the scratching of the spindly legs, see sick white chitinous wings I am filled such foreboding of the plaques this evil brings And we make boundaries with indifference, call them the species at risk Forbid their public swatting, stomping, crushing them quick and brisk O let me see the putrid gut inside, let me hear the crunch of flesh Let me use the new insecticide to bomb them from behind the mesh Splatter them where they fester, let us kill this insect by decree What though some berate us, for we make a dark hole in ecology.