Poesy Friday

FIAT LEPIDOPTERA

Just a small thing, a trifle,
The azure thickness of the merely tangible,
A fatal metalmark's sharpness
Honed to peel from green charm quarks their rind
Was all you asked,
Refusing more,
Demanding, gently, the softest weight of hairstreak wing,
The missing mass that ends creation.
***

A urine-scented boy once brought
A hastily gathered collection,
Monarchs, mostly, and some beetles,
To my third grade class.

Before the bugs,
With nothing to show and no one to tell
I think he cried and others laughed
But it's been years.

I'm only sure what I did,
Going to his house, once,
Tasting the thick smell
And never going back.

But he was king one day
Of butterflies and beetles,
A hastily gathered display
On merely tangible needles.

Then the room's dry heat
Revived the merely dazed,
And monarch after monarch
Jitterbugged on its pin.

The urine-scented boy laughed.

Our teacher grabbed hairspray,
Mercifully smothering.
The colors ran and dancing stopped.
She turned to him, disgusted,

As if to spray away
The vile little boy.
I thought, but didn't say
He doesn't understand;

The pin is merely tangible.
I think he cried and others laughed
But it's been years.
I'm only sure what I did.
***

You demand a trifle,
A confused cloudy wing whisper,
But I hear a monarch dance,
Nearly tangible.
Do you fear, gently, that softest tones of frosted elfin
Scale at merest touch,
A tender butterfly touch,
Sampson Astraptes?

Coax, call, fetch
Without a touch.
And when a well-wisher flits to hand,
A malicious shady skipper,
Do you breathe it away
Or pith its spine
Till someone shouts or whispers
Fiat creole pearly eye, the missing spark?
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