image borrowed from bing
Cristofleoge
imagine baxter’s bafflement after losing
his long battle with cancer, emerging
from the tunnel of photonic rings
not into the cloistered halls of bardo,
but rather encased in some translucent egg
attached to a broad leaf, suddenly returned
to life, morphed magnanimously into a
gelatinous fertilized vulnerable globule
of white homogametic (ZZ) dna,
still sentient, nothing forgotten, intelligence intact
with transcription tapes of past lives on board
before burgeoning into a bug;
another new beginning, this time
without
any pause for pre-planning,
without
gentle counseling,
without
a life review,
just some kind of kafka-like mandatory
unsolicited spiritual surgery, being injected
whole into a gob of butterfly spermatophore,
before marveling at the speedy week
of gestation as the egg proteins split open
and his furry new form unfolded into
a yellow and black knobbed larva,
with 12 husky hirsute caterpillar shoulders,
and a demon hunger providing vital volition
for the fuzzy segments to bristle with purpose,
funneling herbivoric sustenance non-stop
via the voracious maw, burning with the need
to feed, to serve, to worship the glowing
insect helix, while simultaneously excreting
pungent turd sap trails that spiraled sticky
around branches,
busily sending pheromone telegrams to his
ant cousins, vibrating vociferously delta blue
work songs, prompting the tiny red soldiers
to set up protection from predators--
in return for access to reciprocal piles
of honeydew secretions,
driven manically, never at rest, until
the end of the third larval instar,
when the horrid hunger dried up,
when the passion for consumption ebbed,
when tiny incipient wing disks blossomed
as infantile mimics and the caterpillar
persona was penciled into lethargy,
into porous pupa, weaving his personal
chrysalis into a magnificent mud crochet,
a buff bastion this caterpillar keep,
soon lured into a trance of tortoise-shelled
dreams of flight, of sensual delight,
of sun-dog days and fructose nights--
dropping even deeper into the cosmic
mystery of metamorphosis, clearly hearing
the crystalline click of completion before
swimming back to the surface light with
great lunges, gathering blinding speed
before cracking open the chrysalic chamber
with incredible strength and inexorable vigor,
to emerge imago, triumphant, his powerful
wet wings dappled deliciously with black,
yellow, and golden eyespots, furiously flexing
his twin antennae, his proud proboscis swelling
with the sumptuous scents of sap, dung, rotting
fruit and decaying flesh,
launching himself into mountain meadows
that he would become endemic toward,
the first of his kind, double large,
three sets of wings, more than a monarch,
approaching messianic, a king of kings,
announcing himself as papilio jaguaris,
a papal prince of love set loose
among the fluttering multitudes.
Glenn Buttkus
May 2012
Would you like to hear the author read this poem to you?