Hard
& round
& shiny as
a sex toy,
studded collar
biting into
the dirt,
the translucent
hum of
his wings
folded away,
the six-
legged god
plods backwards,
wheeling his
little world
of shit.
Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with 100 trillion of his closest microbial friends — a close-knit, symbiotic community comprising several thousand species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. In a similarly collaborative fashion, all of Dave’s writing is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. For attribution in printed material, his name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact him for permission to waive the “share alike” provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).
This poem will be in there, right?
No, Beth and I don’t publish our own stuff. Almost every theme inspires me to write stuff in response to it, though, and why not? It’s a fun way to plug qarrtsiluni here.
Just poking at you, Dave. Love the poem. Laughed out loud.
Nice. I especially like the first 7 lines.
Thanks. Credit of course goes to Sigmund Freud for being the first (?) to draw an analogy between religious fetish (icon, idol) and sex object.
bravo!
Thanks for the memories. Those little shit-rollers used to scuttle all over the sandy ground of the village where I lived in Senegal. I think we called them dung beetles (can’t remember what the Wolof word was for them). Sounds like they are the same thing as scarabs. I also remember seeing these in iconography all over Egypt. Why the hell did they worship those things?
Chris
“In the minds of the Egyptians the efficacy of the amulet was based on the habits of the actual beetle. The Greek writer, Plutarch (ca. AD 40-120), described their asexual perception of the beetle:
“However, in reality the male and female often work together and it is the female which, after dropping her eggs in the ground, covers them in excrement on which the larvae feed. As the soft dung ball is rolled across the ground, dust and sand attached to it so that it became hardened and was sometimes equal in size to the beetle. Without a doubt in the mind of the unknowing Egyptian this was a thought provoking and impressive achievement that imitated the daily appearance of the sun. This observation prompted the Egyptians to associate the beetle with one of the many aspects of the great sun-god, that of the rising sun, Khepri.”
http://mcclungmuseum.utk.edu/permex/egypt/egs-text.htm