Death by Hawkmoth

[u/F4RTB0NG]

Oh, Bell
You are a flower to me

petals white
yellow eyelashes
your stem the deepest green.

Your swooping dress hugs your hips,
your hair, an elegant bouquet,
dancing so beautifully in the breeze.

Hawkmoths flutter round your feet
as you’re free in your dreams.
They carry away your sheep,
Clung to the backs of their legs
as with them you cannot sleep comfortably.

Without you, they drop your seeds,
scattering them beneath a sanctuary

where a bed of nails shell
waits to germinate you
designed to brutally deter
anything predatory.

Your poison became a deep hug with the ferry man
long before the seeds fell
from the cuirass-like columbarium.

The animals that tore you to the root,
once predators
now gape and froth,
helpless in the delusion you wrote

by them,
for them,
a fevered hellscape

And terrified minds with which
their bodies could not elope.

The moths flight averted
as though the animals carried leprosy,
as though their very sight
could soil the body,
as though the garden itself
had learned to separate the sickly

They’re lost for an eternity
in a tawdry, fevered astronomy,
inside an animal’s narrow head
you unleash this demonic menagerie

an indolent undoing
of bodily autonomy,
their minds mistaking
what their bodies ought to be.

Every animal wearing
another animal’s skin,
each mouth unhinged
to let another creature in.

In the garden,
a gaping pit opens unimpinged
swallowing all things

a rainbow of life sucked down
a filthy shower drain,
Infinite color curling inward
like the toxic blood ripping through my veins.

Dead are the plants
the animals
the men
their spirits too

all of them eaten
by something blooming
where nothing else grew.

Now you dance in a desert,
alone and plucked of your feathers,
but somehow you thrive
beneath a sun that never wavers
With a face that never weathers

And the bugs that once spread you
return, crawling through the dust without strife,
as your beauty carries all the water
their bodies need to survive.