Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝#ClassicPoetry
#NationalPoetryFoolMonth
#poetry
Today's poem is the leading one in my second chapbook, published 2004. It's called "The Powers of Weevils". I'll post it in this thread.
Egg
Sing, oh my muse, so I may get it right
The power of weevils, the insect within
That laughs and murmurs of our open sins
Below reassurances that we recite
When I must consider the means we employ
There’s anger unsleeping, and sweat in the night
If I can not build, then give me the might
The powers of weevils, to spoil and destroy
Larva, second instar
To eat the cotton boll from inside out
Is all the power left within our reach
Our monoculture grown and picked by slaves
Destruction slowly starts within the soul
A creeping blight, a lassitude of will
And then at last the hunger building up
To spoil the crop, devour and tear it down
The weevil power, nothing else to do
Larva, third instar
Weevils wait
Eating the crop from inside
Those clever beetles
Their world is their food
I do not expect a city
To spring up around me
An ordered metropolis
Built from what I chew away
All that’s really needed
Is a reason to keep on
I want a motor
To keep pulling outward, always outward
And when I've had enough --
Shed exoskeleton, new instar
Fatter jaws and limbs
A larger consumer
Adult
I’ve been devouring all my life
Don’t we all hate people who are happy?
Those at peace, when there is no peace
The weevil has become familiar
As icon, totem animal
Symbol for Shiva shrunk
To near insignificance
But only near
In our hordes
We will eat until something falls out
A few pictures of torture perhaps
Or a chewed up ballot
And hold it up in our feelers
“Look, our new society!”
You see, you
have a larva in you, too
/fin
I improved this poem when I copied it just now by leaving out the original last 2 stanzas: a better stopping point. This is a poem that I edited a good deal without any notable improvement in quality.
For each life stage of a weevil, I made the rhyme, meter, and general form more chaotic. Why did I do this? I clearly meant to but now I have no idea why. Probably it was supposed to represent the continuing destruction.
This is a difficult chapbook for me to revisit. There isn't much I like about it now. Because a poet -- and I say this based on seeing many people, not just myself -- has to some extent predictable stages of development, like any artist, and it's worse seeing the *second* batch of things made than the first which is standard but with new promise that the second may not fulfill.
My favorites are like chapbooks 4-6 out of 8.
At any rate this is the poem after which I switched from weevils to termites, a social insect better suited to poets. Weevils are particularly American in this context and I don't think they travel well.
Anyways "instar" is a great word because it applies to arthropods and nothing else.
/fin
PS: The name of this is a joke on Baudelaire's "The Flowers of Evil" and I don't know why I thought this was a great idea. Possibly because flowers of evil is so elegant and goth and I wanted decadence that was more prole and dirtier.