tandem running

she explained why some ants have wings
and others don't,
involved something about how
the ground is the bottom of the sky
and the coupling in-flight
and the males dying either too soon
or not soon enough
and oh, oh, honey,
won't it be fine?
a come-hither look,
her cogs
slipping of teeth,
turning in bed,
and all of us are such
vainglorious, precocious
children! mean-minded bastards
with tongues in each others'
mouths and the highways
that connect our hives
have lately been lined
with orange barrels
and flashing signs
that insist we, all of us moving,
slow everything down.
there's a measurable amount of destruction
that goes into a building, a road, a child
walks into a bar and is offered round
after round and the adults regurgitate
everything into him, mold the wrinkles
he will later see in the mirror.
rub her head against mine
until i can smell everything she is
and has been, so i can follow her home,
so if she is lost i can find her,
her pheromones lighting up the sky
like a ridge of fire advancing through a forest.
so much working, so much cutting of leaves
and trucking home with strangers and then
it's all legs and legs and feeling
like your skin and your bones
are the same, like your organs
are floating, entangling themselves.

she says that's how they do it, ants,
that's how they lose
themselves in the largeness
of the colony. how they all
live and eat and mate
without prisons or art galleries or names.
but if you think about it, she says,
we're all pretty strong for our size,
our tiny hearts lifting mighty things
without second-guessing,
living towards
the chance to grow something
you weren't born with,
the chance to fly away from everything
you've known.