egb, Last poem of NaPoWriMo! The prompt was to write a palinode, in which the speaker abandons a prior position held within the poem.
Really proud of this one! Was a great month for writing but I’m ready for a break now lol.
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but I think he secretly suspected he descended from royalty-the kind of royalty that takes the throne not by birth, but by force. His style of stroking turned me straight to honeydew, the voids he left glowing sweetly green as he sucked the breath out of me and regurgitated it back into my mouth. "To your health," he'd say, and I'd fall asleep to the clicking of his antennae. He bragged of having mated with countless queens before me but I think they would've killed him? I won't pretend to know much about the reproductive rituals of ants. Just wasn't built for the colonial life, myself. We went off and on for a while until he left me for a monarch butterfly. I don't blame him. She was an emblem of joy, lively beyond question, fervid as a wildfire. Anyway, he texted me recently to say he was sorry for being cruel. I decided to love him then.
Didn't we both escape from that same tower of dirt? It took me years to learn how the soft-bodied keep their little bellies fed. And the more I think of it, the more it strikes me sensible that the most sensitive creatures in this rough-hewn world have the hardest exterior shells.