Vignettes & Poetry

We were laid upon a quivering stem, my egg eyed siblings and I.

 

Hatching out, we briefly brush past one another, in adieu. My jelly quilted form undulates, upon 16 hairy stubbed legs. The climb slow and steep, fortuitously, as I have no bones to speak of. Allowing my body to ripple fluidly, in quickening pace; for soon, I will be out of time.

 

Weeks of feasting with crunching mastication, my bellied body is full. Protein and acid, transmutes into saliva cocoonase. Everything I need is within me, it is a time to purge, a time to weave a chambered cloak. The undulations which thrust forth my viscous body now performs an oral spectacle, the spinning of a shimmered yarn. The silken cocoonase secretes from my mouth and with athletic convulsion, I darn and weave this spittled thread, upon the branch and about my body. Hours pass with rhythmic contortions, ribbons of threaded viscera make a fine bedchamber for pupation, as I bring into being ‘A Room of One’s Own’.

 

Within privacy, ancient time affords me the ability of metamorphosis. It is time to become undone, for fluids to secrete, for tissue to dissolve, rearrange and evolve. My forms shuddering with little horrors, fluxing in and out, eventually finding shape.  

 

As I grow into this once echoed chamber, the silken cloak now smothers. One last spewing of spit to dissolve, and make my way through a shaft of light. I take breath through my spiracles, expanding my newly winged body. I push down upon six spindled legs, simultaneously thrusting my head towards the light. My abdomen pulsates in waves as the cocoon creaks and cracks, and sweeps fresh, my velvet dust form. In a final thrust, I leave behind that outgrown hairy husk, out of which, I have birthed myself.

 

Time to unfurl in the feelings of my shift. As my feathered antennae twitch to feel, I uncrease these membraned wings, I take up space unapologetically, into the vastness of new surrounds. A moment to pause, in fluttering...

 

It is, a time to fly...

​

Flared, reddened, inexpressible,

No stopper to pull, feeling for release,

Remembering teeth, recalling bite,

The swell, red cells pumping, tingling,

Ecstatic static,

A splintering invasion upon wetted, hardened gum,

Rust and copper tinted tongue,

Lapping in acrid pleasure,

A fatigued pulsating buzz, diminuendoing into silence.

Unfeathered, unbound, upon the grey gravelled ground,

Grit spangled scattering, imprinting wrinkled flesh,

A veined map, frozen,

A song, lay silenced,

Prepubescent pink, startling yellow, downy grey,

A waxen cloaked translucency,

Endoskeleton, viscera encased, a modest corpse,

An offering, an omen, an amulet for the taking,

Lightly fallen, untouched,

Lightly fallen, untouched,

Lightly fallen, untouched.