Deal.

April means bugs, sooo
maybe pictures of Burlington later.
I found a palace made from a hole in the wall, but that is a story for another day.
Today's just

Cooking for one

the cricket; now he’s a dapper gentleman,

and I mean the real cricket. The one in his glossy black always—not the grasshopper who plays a fiddle, but the cricket, whose pocket handkerchief bears a fold trifect (not just perfect)
always by hand.

I romanticize the fiddle in a rough wooden way, though I’ve always had a liking for frozen grasshopper bars

Crickets and luck go along the same dirt path through the mountains, not hand in hand, nor one bringing the other, but crickets and luck move along the same path in both directions.

The cicada’s got another song                                                                                    it don’t mean luck.

or even lack of, she’s just hill country and high country who leaves her skin
you can’t call her a treehugger. She’s not in there. That’s not where you’ll find her.

But it’s the only way to get out of the ground.

Seventeen years and you think I could’ve paid attention to where I left that moment, but it feels like this skin’s just rubbing off,

though I don’t even know about that. I am glad to have known the ground,
because without it how would I know how to romance [it]? and how would I be able to listen?

… she’s paying attention. don’t

 you go on thinking she’s not, but like one cricket’s always dandy she’s always got eyes and skinless, this is even more intense than imagined, in the passive voice of a broken footstep

the other side of the globe. These bugs, they’re this land, the way they’ll show up in others,
but this language is
difficult enough as it is already/always
female cicada turns her bald-eye unashamedly, and with some genuine curiosity, towards Grasshopper. remember, Cricket’d got his shine and his tune, but this grasshopper I don’t think I mentioned in the anecdote about luck,

he was up atop a ridge,

the way those squirrel divers go for thin air and power? Loss of power? Control? Loss of
control? That grasshopper I saw, up there in-pinnacled with all his legs together on the tiniest point of rock. Cicada didn’t say anything, didn’t need to and could not have anyways – what’s she going to do, stop a jump that could have been for posterity but could also have been for pure escape? But he hadn’t yet.

Amazement, or something like it, ensues (cricket doesn’t notice; he’s buying fine European rosin to wax with, and enjoying the company of luck) but the fiddler on the ridge is up there because he is quite busy turning into a female praying mantis.

But I have always had a liking for frozen grasshopper bars. does that make me some quasi-dominant eater of real mint and imitation insect (consumer in the french word

conscience) while

this other exoskeleton-buster is busy becoming the empowered bearer of false mint green and the reality of a mate in flagrante eaten … delicto.

babe, I left my skin tied to a tree, and that was intense, brother

mother
what should I call you?
but I am watching you sit next to your old skin, which is now quite pale and beginning in just the slightest to melt not like wax but that’s the best word I’ve got
this cicada met a candle once
didn’t touch it

 But this cicada, I met a candle once,

and she has always liked frozen grasshopper bars

the cricket comes along his mountain road to a fine restaurant where he, true to form, purchases one of those bars. at this point you should know that they are the sort which can only be made from a box-mix and passed around during a game Sunday, fresh out of the cooler but much better just out of the freezer in a messy kitchen with slobbery little kids and adults that are a little slobbery as well,

she’s just hill country and high country

This cricket, he purchases a bar, and the city is not like this. It may be high country but it is also refined, talent that is no longer raw, and this cricket? He walks the city streets and listens to children in backyards and tries hard not to judge the slobbery men that he sees while consuming this most fine piece of recommended baked goods.

  To the cicada, the cricket comments in all honesty that he quite enjoyed this bar, because he saw that it went perfectly with the city, and she just smiles on her listening-skin but doesn’t think it’s important to tell him

he’s completely wrong.

The joy of a frozen grasshopper bar may well be purchased and appreciated that way, dear cricket, but that is not what I meant and you don’t know it.

I’m glad you liked the bar. I would have too. In fact, in that context, I would have done exactly what you did, and in that I am being just as honest as you. But when I mentioned this bar, that’s not what I mentioned.

The namesake of the bar, or rather its de facto by coincidence namesake that is no longer a namesake but instead a loosely-collected pile of white sludge and a newly presiding lady mantis, is still somewhere along the road

the lady cicada, she got a chance to meet luck once too,

never walked with luck the way that cricket did,
but saw that luck wears spats

luck and the lady mantis are probably still deep in the mountains,
having a conversation about those spats and the ones the mantis would like to get,
or would like to make, or already has
but might now throw out
because luck has them too,

and that’s cool

 and the cricket’s gone on his merrie waie.

Lady cicada sighs.

Cooking for one is difficult.

Grasshopper don’t even need a hookah,

he so rail-thin

Cricket don’t even need a restaurant, the waitresses find him

Mantis, her mate was Cunegonde, and he don’t exist

but I don’t know about these days

he might just rise up,
he might just be shaking his fist and knitting a ... set of cloth jaws or whatever
be the mantis equivalent

 dear broken footstep

that was one time too many

we jazz junebugs.