In the black-dead silence
of an oak-dead coffin
a hundred hateful caterpillars feast on soft flesh.
After gorging through a succulent calf one opts for an escape:
Drills a wormhole through wood walls,
and burrows upwards emerging convict style
into cool spring air.
It squirms like a sleeping bag, up-across a headstone,
before folding within, forming a crust.
It hibernates in the engraved words:
"age five”

On a summer morning
she stirs with a quick twitch,
squirting out from her crisped bed-clothes to unfold;
shaking herself dry like a tea-towel.
Two sulphur-shaded leaves tremor
either side of a filament-thin body.
Six pin feet hook-hold the basking granite stone.
Drying antlers flex like coils, measuring.
She flips into the air like a loose sheet of paper
and drifts which-ever way on a morning breeze.

The music of traffic attracts her as the music of house-parties attracts teenagers.
She finds herself dallying on a swishing motorway.
"That thing." Speeding motorists remark to their empty passenger seats,
"Has no chance!"
But she flits over juggernauts,
dances past vans
and surfs over slip-streams
as flies, wasps and midges dash themselves to liquid on stained windscreens.

She spots him weaving
amidst this metallic bull run.
He spies her too.
They wing towards each other, dodging vehicles offhandedly.
Flirting, tickling, touching,
joining.
She quivers beneath him. Savouring.
Now he wafts exhausted
into the humming air and hovers a paused farewell,
before diving headlong into the first 'O' of VOLVO.

Unabashed, she catches her breath and re-catches the air,
rising much higher this time above the swashing convoy.
Gravitating towards the hazy silhouette of the town,
she finds a busy main road.
Alighting a fence post she waits for a potential site to
lay her eggs.

Two women waffle, rooted in the pavement,
as a child dawdles, bored, unseen, around her mum's tree trunk legs.
She looks up and sees those shining buttercup wings
dancing a salutation.
She extends an ankle-thin arm
hand outstretched
and offers a landing pad.
The wings accept,
dropping like a whisper onto her trusting palm
as her new friend.
But the wings fling themselves airwards once more
and hover
but just out of reach.
She follows those fairy-wings:
One step.
Two steps.
Her mother turns to see her daughter dreaming in the road
and seizes her back
by the ponytail, out of a howling bus-lane.

Two yellow wings beat harder from frustration
before calming, and she re-settles on the fence post
with the consolation of future prey.