Embedded and dormant,
they neither wake nor sleep
but defer and endure
until a sun-seeded air
percolates in countless
humming sepulchral lungs.
There is a foretelling,
an imminent rustle of shoveling wings -
the soil erupts,
whirlwinds swarm tree and leaf.
Now begins the cacophony,
the drumbeat of innate necessity.
Wing plates thrum
against chitinous abdomens,
a fretsaw orchestra hollows out
cavities for creation.
Grasping obsessions
become strangleholds of insemination,
then unto death do they pour.
We who sweep away or step upon
their stiffly crinkled corpses,
to our numbed ears comes a solace
as the raucous interlude abruptly ends,
nor do most keep account of the years,
until the next pronouncement
of yet another reincarnation blares forth.
A screen door
creaks
small incursions
into rip and hole.
Unseen, a creeping grub and thriving,
chitinous mandibles
munch upon the desiccated dead,
thrive in the thrash and mingle.
Corruption forms its disorderly queue,
jointed question marks
walk on segmented legs
spindly limbs pry
where slick eggs incubate.
As time swings its metronome,
splintered chips
flake away, wood
cracks its rotting bones.
Internal scaffoldings
crumble,
mold multiplies,
mildew clings to
muck.
A festering wriggles forth.
"Honey, can you oil the back door,
it's creaking again."
I scrunch my butt deeper into the sofa.
"I'll get on it after the game." I say,
making a mental note
to get more beers in,
Tomorrow, slap some paint
over the wormholes
maybe.
The chitinous mechanics
of head, thorax, and abdomen,
clicking exoskeletons,
the chirring of dry whispers.
We admire the purposeful
simplicity of the heedless.
Houses crumble as evidence.
Trees rot and give witness.
Caves crawl
with their evidential passing -
they command the locomotion and menu,
of the inevitable.
We who must be consumed,
know that as prey we are not too large,
and so, we lumber on as elephants will,
on their way
to long prepared graveyards.
Dying with my duty done, my life’s ambition filled,
I hear and feel the rustling from that which I did build.
Arachni-matron-me, I feasted ‘pon the mate I killed –
Before creating (lovingly?) the sac that holds my brood.
Chitinous appendages – a thousand eight-fold sets –
Scramb-ling, tearing, clawing to escape their natal nets.
Th’time is nigh, I’ll never see their thousand eye octets –
I’m glad I cannot contemplate becoming their first food.
(Poem is an "ochtfochlach", which is an Irish verse form of 8 lines. The rhyme scheme is aaab cccb.)
Written on June 2, 2023 for the "Bag of Spiders Poetry Contest".
In the country we do not have city vison,
we have a phosphorus luster,
we have snails and worms
that turn over a silvered mulch.
The slow burn of a late dusk
kindles sun-setting shadows –
the sheen of beetle clipper-claws.
A chitinous moonlight flickers
upon crystalline windowpanes.
Then there is the glint of gravel in starry waters,
unearthed shimmer paths and a leafy luminosity
in midnight cisterns.
Those stars, they keep arriving
until the darkness shrinks between their light,
and if it is overcast, we set a lamp on a high place,
one that can be seen from hidden and
faraway mountain-tops.
Slumbering woods bloom
under beetle plowed pulp.
Up above,
the canopy is bare,
and sheds only white zero’s.
Beetles hum beneath the rot,
detonate inaudible chitinous chimes,
troglodyte tones
under a dormant mulch.
Everywhere,
ambiguity buds open and close
in a subterranean flurry.
When the ice breaks its quash and quell,
they surface
round and gleaming
to chase new laid morsels down;
their feeding
turning earth for the seeding sun.
The chitinous mechanics
of head, thorax, and abdomen,
clicking exoskeletons,
the chirring dry whispers.
We admire the purposeful
simplicity of the heedless.
Houses crumble as evidence.
Trees rot and give witness.
Caves crawl
with their evidential passing.
They command the locomotion and menu,
of the inevitable.
We who must be consumed,
know that as prey --- we are not too large,
to be inedible.
A truth that all elephants understand,
as they make their way to
their bone-gnawed graveyards.
Chitinous wings envelop me.
I can't breathe here,
The air sears my lungs.
I taste blood in the back of my throat.
The pain
is
exquisite.
The insect hymns
press gently on the inner ears.
They hide in the umbra,
great intricacies
of chitinous clicks
and timpanis
and tiny shockwave harmonies
grooving late
into the ferocious night -
until the umbra yowls
and hoots,
and the the hunters seek the hymns.
Standing at this divergence
I reflect upon the route I have traversed
one that felt so modest
now is exceedingly knotty.
Covert thoughts, anew in my head,
propagated from the night?
Some dark niche, not yet explored
or willfully ignored?
Kept stagnant by my psyche
ignoring the silent murmur.
In me the id screams for freedom.
I am bombarded with speculation
all bright and shiny.
It ensnares my soul
like a silvery tongued gypsy
or a euphonious siren.
I scrimmage alone with this fracas
in my mind's eye.
Seeing one path but yearning for the other
If I were to imbibe from this oasis
created in seclusion
and metamorphosize into myself
I would cast off this chitinous pelt
and expose this tender flesh
I secret away.
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