The Caterpillar

 

This isn’t a poem about a caterpillar

that changes into a butterfly, or a moth.

It’s about the invasion of an invasive species.

Isn’t a caterpillar, really, just a nice word for maggot?

or worm? I think it is.

I have been called both a maggot and a worm

over time. A kid with several older brothers

gets called everything at some point.

I’ve lived the short life of every derogatory term

the evilest part of your mind can conceive.  

But I’m certainly a caterpillar and I’ve been

a caterpillar for all my natural life,

never changing into nothing.

I am the same human I was at three.

The same little fag I see in photobooks

in my dead mother’s cold room

on her squishy waterbed with the rose-red sheets.

 

I ate animals back when that was cool

because I was fed them no differently

than a cannibal child would be fed a human.

I wore leather coats and shoes and all my soaps

had previously been injected into monkey eyes.

I suppose I killed things to kill them a time or two, too.

Like ants under magnifying glasses –

No. I never did that.

But I watched someone to see if he could

with intense interest.

And when he did, I pushed him down

but the ant was still on fire

and there was nothing I could do about it

besides to stomp on him. Or her.

Maybe it was fine because I couldn’t hear him,

or I couldn’t see his face as his exoskeleton

was seared by the flames of the sun

and as the boy grinned, plotted in the grass.

He was a friend of mine, though. That evil boy.

Boy. Noun. A young human male. 

 

Someone at a backyard football game killed a cat.

It might have been a kitten even.

He was bigger than me and I couldn’t do anything

about it. I didn’t watch, but I could hear it.

I just looked up into the clouds and I –

well, I don’t wish to think or speak of it anymore.

Kill me if you like – however you like.

It doesn’t matter to me.

I threw a ball once at a bird

just to see if I could hit it.

And I did.

It seizured in a recessed window on a brick ledge.

It was my bedroom window, I recall.

I picked it up like Jesus picked up Lazarus,

but it didn’t do anything in my palms but die.

I cried for about an hour. Buried it in the backyard

with all my pets that had gone before.

I suppose, I felt that was some sort of honor

in my human pretentiousness –

like I had ferried it myself to Heaven.

Jesus. Noun. In Christian theology, Son of God. The Savior.

 

I ate raw hamburger balls before I realized

where they came from. I guess, I knew.

At eight I knew, and that uneasiness stayed in me.

If you were to put me on trial at Nuremburg

or something, yeah, sure, I knew.

I think you’d get a guilty verdict for me.

They could always bring up that bird, or that kitten,

or the ant and make a damn good case

for complicity in the least.

But those hamburger balls are sensational

because I ate them raw. Chewed them like apples.

It would seem better if they were cooked.

More innocent, somehow. Wouldn’t it?

I think of the man who ordered his steak “mooing”

before I stabbed him in the eye with a fork

in my head.

When I was a waiter too reliant upon tips

to do anything so rash.

But I wanted to, I’ll tell the jury. It was true.

I could fairly blame my mother,

but I do not. I don’t blame anyone but myself.

Blame. Verb. To assign responsibility for a fault or wrongdoing.

 

I could blame my father for lots of things.

For the women. The alcohol. The fighting.

Or more positively, for my work ethic.

It is what people said of him at his funeral.

He worked hard all his life,

hardest working man, I ever knew –

with that same cold, uneasy grin.

But no one offered the obvious follow-up they all were thinking.

Well, what the hell did it get him?

Absolutely nothing.

 

I wondered if he ever had a venereal disease.

Or if he ever raw-dogged a hooker in a hotel room

and thought of beating her over the head with

The Bible when she took a shit with the bathroom door open.

I wonder these things all the time.

I wonder if he ever spent his paycheck on coke,

flew in a hot-air balloon,

or gambled it all away hoping to buy us all

a trip to Disney World.

I doubt it, though.

He played the lottery to try to escape from us.

To have a dream for something more.

He once hit it big enough to buy me a samurai sword.

10 grand or something.

I got a hundred bucks.

 

I am not a butterfly.

And I will never be a butterfly.

I have felt bad for every bad thing I’ve ever done,

and carried the burden of a moth,

whether those I have hurt believe it or not.

It doesn’t matter what they believe.

I don’t care about them anymore, honestly.

I don’t care about any human-being.

I wouldn’t know how to make a cocoon if my life

depended on it, I once thought,

even though they said to do so on TV.

They showed us all how. With newspapers and sticks.

Impervious, was their word.

 

I am the same person I was at three when I was in love

with animals, insects, and my mom,

though she murdered animals for the sake of dinner

and leftovers no one ever ate.

She could blame Betty Crocker and her mother before her.

She killed lots of bugs, too.

Maybe I’m a fly. I am a fly. Flies survive.

I should go back and rename this the fly if I have time to,

or write a companion piece.

I can still smell fly guts on the yellow-plastic flyswatter

my brother liked to push in my face

when he was being an asshole.

 

We were this innate primordial virus that nothing

seemed ever able to kill. This arrogant, vile species

that did little for any other species besides use them

to our liking and establish a word for it – Dominion.

God wanted it that way, we said, because he gave us the ability to kill,

to breed, to use, to rape.

Kill. Verb. To cause the death of.

AIDs, Ebola, Cancer. World Wars.


We survived all of that.

But maybe you will do it, as some have prophesized.

War of the Worlds even told the tale you’re actuating.

People made hasty cocoons

when they heard you were coming,

trying to be butterflies rather than moths.

As though when they came out, you wouldn’t be here

or they would be accepted by you somehow.

Reformed into the beautiful things they never were.

No one will ever had hurt an animal in their life,

when you ask them.

But when you cut their pods open

they will fall out like fat maggots

and look like Nazis at Nuremburg.

Defeated. Not so proud now to goosestep on broken glass,

on Jews and Jew babies in the streets of Krakow.

No one will be a butterfly. We haven’t got it in us.

Nor will they have ever had torn the wings

off a butterfly, or smashed a firefly on the sidewalk to see its glow.

 

But not me. I’m still a caterpillar.

Spare the children, no one else.

They love and are not assholes just yet.

They can be saved.

Send the rest to their respective Heaven or Hell.

They are long overdue.

 

I waited in my cocoon with my samurai sword

for the aliens to do God’s work,

scared as I was thinking of my mom dying

and the invasion back when I was eight and

saw it on Unsolved Mysteries.

When they cut open my pod, I confessed.

And they made me their human translator

for the few random words and things

that they do not know.

Maybe just until they know them.

There are others like me,

caterpillars, they call us.

They let me keep the sword because

they know I intend to do no harm

and it is dull – the kind you can’t sharpen.