April 29th, 2007

The World Through a Bug

I was out on the Boathouse deck earlier tonight, around dusk, scribbling in my Mead Composition book. As it’s condition to do, the sun went to visit how the other half lives, and pushed me inside the boathouse, to this old workbench I’ll write upon. There I was, messaging letters into words, when a pause hit me, and I dozed on the window for a spell. It was full of little bugs aching for the light. Hundreds of the tiny fellows.

I watched them scurrying about, in what appeared to me a chaotic and frenzied pace, no apparent pattern to their travels, content to bask in manufactured 75 watt bliss. I wondered if they preferred the sunlight to the man made variety. I watched some more, couldn’t tell. I then wondered what they thought of me. This big cloth of flesh, doing nothing particularly important, staring at them, hovering in their space, and with that I wrote the following poem.

What does this bug see
when this bug sees me?
Does a bug even see,
when it looks at me?
And what might it be,
that it sees?
Is it me?

Who is this me,
that the bug might see,
if the bug sees?

Best I try to see
like the bug sees me.
Then I might know
how the bug sees me,
and just who that me
might be.

written for the april poem-a-day every-once-in-a-while exercise