First nobody's trying to say they got the bad press of spiders and snakes, but still, it's got to be as bad as bats, what locusts — our brothers of the dank earth — have had to put up with all these years from otherwise decent people, people who normally wouldn't harm a fly want to crush them underfoot like so much bubble wrap, keep them under their thumbs as if they were too subversive to touch. And for what?

For no good reason but that they've been living in the dark cold earth far from our prying eyes for 11, 13, or 17 years, continuously, a feat horrifyingly unimaginable in itself, living off of god only knows what, minuscule portions of detritus that nothing else seeking nourishment from the loam to the hard scrap would have, clay striations like rigor mortis, tyger-eyed in sheer unfeeling, managing to eke out an existence in the alienating realm just a few feet below the pedestrian clomping and chomping of our own horse's asses' hoof beats and hearts pining for this or that butterfly wing lost, who wants burgers, fetching dogs.

But we know so little of loss compared to the noble locust who, against the odds, continues to root blindly toward an unknown destiny, nor where nor when, likely cannot even imagine in her wildest dreams, nor can anyone within comprehension of my so-called words begin to grasp the cold and lonesome way they have to make for no apparent reason whatsoever, and yet they do, indomitably they do, and after an infinitude of imperceptible progress, one day in a surge of yearning undeniable as orgasm find themselves breaking the surface of a scalding realm cacophonous, scorching rays flaying half-shed skin clutched in claws and hardened in the harsh caress of walnut poplar and unkindest cut maple bark harrowing the under-belly, yet on they cling and scratch, glazing without while glistening within, the definition of excruciation, our brave brothers the locusts endure for the sake of their own sweet love of each other, intoxication with their own kind, for other than kooks and etymologists who gives a flying fuck in a rolling donut for them, their archaic pre-historic forms, ridiculed in the popular press, bug-eyed cartoons, hysterical outcries for their heads, the substance of knock-kneed menus with their christian names inscribed above them.

But we who have heard them sing, who have felt their trill in our deep hearts' core, who know that they sang for us alone know and adore them for their fierce desperate grace, their anthracitical love moans, their rhinocerian tenderness and determination, for we have heard them each to each and, unlike that piss-pants Prufrock, have no doubt that not only do they sing to me, but my stolen heart-strings stretched heartlessly beyond themselves to yearn in eternal return, tearing my useless hundred bent legs out by their roots — no mind — as I scrape through the slivered opening stringent of passage and yet enough to get through, more unforgiving than the needle's eye, brighter than the tyger's, yet through and out on tender fins scorching in the sand, oh, the glare, the glare! No words for the terror of the first few powerless eons on the hateful bark, hell hounds of breeze ripping through me trying to tear me from the last shreds of a dream of silence I cannot remember now having ever known but is lost in grief never to be seen or heard again, good lord, you promised and abandoned in the same breath with the same words and after that I passed over the lamb's blood and the frogs and the plagues and awoke from such craving of union with you, my beloved, that all the universe crystallizes in my wings, all the wild woods lean into and lift my cry, my heart my love my at-long-last truth, we are one we are all we will never be apart in our eternal now of unbroken trill that begins in the frozen clay of my vision of you and ends in the far black holes of the deep blue sky!