[Split Eight]

Posted by Clutbuck as a stand-in verse



"I knew our mission was designed with the inevitability of failure in mind. I accepted it. Understood it. But what struck me hard, out of nowhere, was that Wilcox didn't know..."

We were a colony of ants with a home built on unity
a proud product of our ancestry and own ingenuity.
A close-knit community with everybody playing a part
from those soldiering dutifully away in the yard.
The women raising their larvae through adolescence,
while males were discarded as having only one use within essence.
To reproduce at the zenith of their physical primes
in a herculean effort to deliver new life.
Those picked at the direct request of The Queen
were risking their lives to attend to her needs.
Her sentry stampeded through Tunnel Two up ahead
with antennae defeated, hanging loose from their heads.
Gewgar chewed for a second, standing upright as he clacked,
“She wants you to be next,”
he sighed in our path.
Wilcox eyed him erratically, despite my jostling limbs,
“Yes sir!”
he bites without asking or stopping to think.
“What are you drinking, pond water?!” I tried intervening
Wilcox was implicit
“I’m making sure my life has a meaning,”
“By dying!?” I pleaded for my friend to see sense
“By trying,” he reasoned.
“Remember me, friend.”
I guess in the end he chose to ignore my advice,
He wouldn't accept it back then because he thought he was right.
For him the order that night had made him a martyr,
but what I saw was my lifelong friend make his faithful departure.
Bravely he fathered a new generation of ants
who would break from the larvae freshly laid in our camp.
The day that they hatched signalled the day of our doom
with The Aged surpassed, then displaced by the new.
While the brave and the foolish quietly sleep,
The cradle of youth rocks gently, as the cycle repeats...