Before; then the stone age, then the bronze age, then the iron age, then the ancients, then the greeks, then the romans, then the dark ages, then the middle ages, then the renaissance, then discovery, then machinery, then now.

An insect man sits with his many eyes looking through rituals of decomposition. Through slits of carven writing, through thumb-nubbed tool handles and the faded devices of dynasties.
The insect Man is a factory, a pick-axe handle, a razor of flint, a plank, an ankh, a camera shutter, a tail-fin. Insect man don’t know no love don’t know no hurt; knows blood and guts and fucks though, squeezed into words and sediment, and long rows of figures under headings in a thousand hands.
Insect Man doesn’t know taste. His room is a cave of threads, his bed is of reeds, the uppers of his shoes are london, soled athens, a tongue of rome, it’s straps are flayed donatello and stippled with arcadia.
Then Insect Man is made of emulsion, his carapace is celluloid glazed with moving pictures and a dark cave wall. His mouth is empty, his teeth are stretched out on a rope many nights long.
Insect Man never woke up to it, he has stared for all your lives with his milky insect eyes that don’t know, that don’t know and he is tired, and he was tired, and he tires of tiring when he is born again. Was tired in the first Fire, the first Gun Shot, the first Sling Shot to The Moon and Back, to the first Dull Edge, the first Sharp One too.
An insect man sits with his many eyes, and he cannot see, he hasn‘t got the right, he ain’t got the hang, no manual, no remit, no certificate, no proof of ownership. They’re not his eyes.

Our pigeon visits us daily in our hushed Paradise
He has a tail like a vampires teeth,
A morbid sash of wispy feathers;
Fanned out as he flickers away,
Momentarily distracted from our childsplay.

On returning he whispers something into my ear.
A message from,
A lost love,
Perhaps,
Or a dead relative come to say farewell.
What’s the difference?

Once, as summer showers began to threaten,
He even nibbled your finger.
A token of thanks for the amusement of it all.
He had forgotten,
You see, that
We were of a different kind.

Of his tail my headdress is made.
A blinding shroud, a decorated deafness.
I love him but I did not know.
I asked you to catch him
For me, my love, fluttering in the cage that was your clasped hands.
Your nails on my neck and your breath fanning his frantic feathers across my ear,
Like threads of hair, cobwebs drifting.

On being released
Flustered, he ruffled his quills once or maybe twice
And continued to peck at the shiny thing
That he could not name
But that looked like a cat’s
Yellow
Eye.

We go for each other, the final task
Union always preceding disintegration

Hands slide over hips; and thighs
As I draw you closer, deeper into me
Thick between my toes and heavy against my breasts
I fall wholeheartedly into the feast
Caked in a lifetimes worth of sleek slippery mud, the fusion of our elements,
Twin, bear thy nature, monster from the deep
Penetrating each crevice, bathed in my reciprocation

Soaked and heaving with the effort of disentanglement
I lift my limbs and my crustation of a body from upon yours
Slipping and sliding now, running to the lands of liquid
The tides had anticipated us
Knowing from what deeds we came
it mixed and frothed its depths into a curtain of clouds
A veil awaiting to envelop us and wash one of us away.

I returned to my brothers and sisters
Glistening and snorting they came for me
I clawed and rubbed myself free from your body of dust
Thickly matted hair released itself and reaching out and spreading
Became the silky silver fur of a seal rolling in the spray
I disappeared into my world once more, all tail and flirting whiskers
Eyes of ebony with a melancholy cry I bid her goodbye

She stepped from the waters, shining and pristine
Glad to be rid of me and I of her

All I left was a faint smell of the muddy marshes and salt tides.