Rows of burgundy dots scurrying across the way
The ants, their tiny limbs do carry onward; their
Quick soldier legs diminutive beneath the shadow
Of my outstretched palm;
I bid them a cordial welcome...


In the distended silence of my troubles;
how indefinite are their toils, clenching
sustenance in chaliced mouths, Chewing the
dusk between their infinitesimal souls, and
Yes, even the worker ants bear sentience,
not from within But from without, the source which
I lovingly pulsate, a veneration for their tiny forms...


The insignificance they exude is but
the purport of their being; they march,
auburn paradoxes in the prescient air, wild
In their slight trifles; your size
is of no consequence, for I witness
a perfect procession of life, brimming with hurry,
waves of spirit dabbed on a cold slab of sill,
burning in a lurid phantasm of goodness,
magnanimity caught in a heartless insect,
a tiny speck of universe throbbing, untouched...


You are greater than that of man,
packed with resolution and godly brawn
Oh what beauty you project,
and how your tedious projects go unseen,
And yet none but I can grasp, what glory!
The vision I behold in leggy appendages synchronized,
cluttering, tick tacking in the November quiet,
Nature's minature parade, each participant a festive dot...


They flutter onward, unabashed,
fastidious and cruelly nonchalant
In their paltry errand, nosh their kin
careful and methodical, while in grouped cooperation,
cracker crumb and bits of cheese, pillaging artfully,
Pirates in plunder, eagerly sucking on grains asunder...


Like beggars on an ivory street, pangs of hunger
not detaining their ferocity, Humanity incarnated
in the morph of a lowly terrestrial, small and daft,
Quiet, without discordance or dissonance, and
the fall of the night electrifies, their wonderful march,
the moonlight glimmering upon their tiny heads,
The glare of a bulb atop my burnished stove,
heats their egress and ingress, 
through tiny holes in the curdled wall...


How great you are in your dwarf stature,
as bald, brown Napoleons set for war!
Naked and armored, knights without horse,
riding life on a whim, valiant in their discourse,
Handsome in their unity, firey and earth trodden,
kinetic filaments crowding, discrete in true haste...

I do not beseech thee to divulge your secrets;
you are but a secret yourselves
All mechanical yet all emotive,
antennae arousing at the slightest movement...

Prepared to die, tenaciously alive,
bashing so dauntless into the cold face of Fate
In these understandings, you are understood;
my unworthy hand dare not crush you,
Should I spray you away, such is a sentence
for which none is worthy, be but an abominable mistake,
For are ye not living as am I, swelling with breath?
Are you not anxious in the predicament of mortality?

So many thoughtless creatures would
smite you too quickly, underestimating,
So commence your toil! I will not judge
your silly scurry as stupid, what profound joy
your determined work brews in my soul,
To undermine such strength is to deny
the ever mystical shape of existence, and
I appreciate and thoroughly commend your poise...

And here I will stand, insane in the dim light,
eyes transfixed and immobile, caught
Surveying russet epiphanies popping their
mystic purpose into pockets of damp oxygen...

And in this moment I feel lowlier than the ant,
humiliated at my lack of direction,
For so the perishable parishioners before me
sing the meaning of existence in infinite secret,
That which I shall never be cognizant of
I should alas fall face into the dirt, crumble to dust
A thing of vast emptiness and I, an empire of
guilt and vice...

Alas! these pedestrians are the true medal bearers...

Lifting nuggets of labor in their glorious plight,
walking the unsteady tightrope of Reality,
But unlike ambivalent Man, who treads with great caution,
They shall never glance curiously below their feet, 

and

slip...