Toothed antennæ rippling in a draft
Twisting up from heads with fractal eyes
And jaws that open sideways, fit to grab
Some fifty times their weight on shaky shafts
That number six to each. What's more, their size
Is peanuts when compared to their potential
For they can level trees and move rivers.

Their colonies spread like viri,
And they're invincible, so they seem to think.
"Safety in numbers." That's the way,
Invading every home and
sometimes even building them,
With over six billion strong
Crawling blindly on a marble
Rolling 'round a fire and
What a fire it is,
Burning bigger, wider every day, still
Throwing glowing embers all around and
Spitting prominences in any direction
Anytime it wants, and it doesn't like
The bastards crawling on the marble, and
Neither does the marble, nor the forest
Watching the marble in disgust, with
Owls and ferrets hungry, waiting
For a midnight snack, of course,
It's always midnight here.
The longest night of the year.
The dirt between the trees ends sharp
And all awash in milk and lactose
Sugars ending sharp,
A regal ax, yellow and white, a flushed milky way
Leading in a spiral through the bush, with
One of the arms leading down
To that blister'd marble, tortured. All for what?
Are its parasites looking for renumeration somehow?
Financial growth is quite absurd.
One dead on one marble's side and
Several bundles of joy on another.
Invincible, they say.
Their population will increase to such a size
That their own invincible numbers
Will crush them under their own weight.
The fire'll keep to burning on as though
Nothing had happened.
The fire will grow and burn the orb
And come back again. A ball of heat,
But not for long.
The fire'll die and turn to soot,
A black hole in the ground.
Rocks and logs will fall inside
And pride would take a detour, hitch a ride
On a leaf, blowing into the hole, as well.
The milk will evaporate from the dirt
And it won't be such a milky way any more
And the forest will always be there

Watching

But until that happens, things will happen as they may.
They'll all feel safe in numbers, blind to their expanding weight,
Proliferating, eating, getting fatter, day by day.

Six billion ants, crawling on a plate.

04/07/2005

Author's Note: Hopefully this is pretty self-explanatory.

Posted on 04/08/2005
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