Centre Of Inertia

Soliloquy for a Rotting Apple

Hanging by a twisted stalk,
I am ignored,
allowed to suppurate
and left to drop.

Centred in my core,
my precious seed
holds firm,
cradled by soft rot.

A severed thread,
a moment of denial,
followed by an ecstasy
of falling.

I lie in idle grasses
but I do not sleep,
I gaze at wisps of
lazy cirrus curling

and vapour trails
stitched across
a sky so blue
I want to weep.

My body shrinks
and puckers
and I surrender
to the suck of flies.

I make no attempt to think
and no attempt to hide,
but lie impassively and
wait for wasps.

The first wanderer
arrives
in black and yellow
battledress,

droning just beyond
the edge of sight,
posing more than just
an idle threat.

It lands,
turning on the spot,
finds equilibrium then
stops to test the air.

With twin antennae,
flexible as whips,
it then advances
on six-legged fingertips.

More wasps
gather in my folds,
but I am inert,
unable to resist

as they claw
at my pale breast
in their frenzied eagerness ~
my insect-children.

They rip me open,
wounds red raw
and tear my tender flesh
with plier jaws,

then blindly creep
towards the centre
of my sweet
corruption.

I am wrapped in
writhing buzz-saw madness,
trapped beneath
their frantic bite,

but I am complicit
with their plan
and pledge
my autumn sacrifice.

My seed exposed,
each one black
as any field mouse eye,
I am disrobed.

Then evening shadows
press them home on
drunken wings,
swallowed by the folding dark.

In the first frosts
beneath a frigid sky
they will forget
and curl and die and

with daggers aimed
toward their own cold hearts,
I will forgive the part
they played in this.