Cristofleoge

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

Posted over on Monday Melting 18

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