Luminous Diptera

^{Untitled, digital photograph, © N Nazir 2021}

Sorrow is the most efficient light-producing entity in the world. 
Its luciferous quality communicates with other woes
and their similar dance steps attract each other.

Despair flies around with its unique firework display 
while calculation sits perched on a branch waiting 
for its own particular brand of ache to arrive.

(Calculation – genus: from the determinus family, also known as stratagem, totting up, figuring out or the reckoning).

Some despairs synchronise their flashing patterns to attract more calculations 
particularly those oft-seen American types that live in the Great Smoky Mountains.
How successful they are is another matter.

(Despair – genus: from the abandonment family, also known as pain, anguish, melancholy or gloom)

Each sorrow has its own particular colour.  
Some glow cerulean
others blaze green 
while still others storm
orange or flare yellow.

They taste disgusting, however.  

When sorrows are mistakenly thought to appear delicious 
they instead emit a bitter blood that poisons the muncher.
(the munchee’s last laugh).

They often practise cannibalism of their own kind.
Calculations like to consume opposite despairs of their own genera 
by mimicking their dance steps then eating them alive 
whilst the poor despair believed they were finally going to mate
with the perched and tantalising calculation. 

Yet if nectar of the gods is scarce
and there are no unsuspecting despairs
they will eat silent moving spirals or nothing at all.

The fascinating thing is that sorrows have their own language. 

Females sorrows, aka calculations, will puppet the language of a despair
aka male sorrow, from another clan (a rival despair, no less)
to trick it into mating with them when it really wants to gorge them alive
which it often successfully achieves. 

What they don’t realise
and this is the dark splendid bluff of the whole thing

is that the male sorrow of the same clan as the female
also mimics the dance steps of the rival sorrow
so the female ends up eating its own kind not a rival sorrow at all.

What a sad sphinxes’ riddle it all is!

So, to the left of the equator the number of sorrows is declining
because the too-clever belly-gorging females are eating them all
by tricking the not-clever-enough males
who plot their own back and get eaten anyway. 

So how can they truly evolve? 
They morph into something else, forget themself then eat themself.
Proof that being too clever can destroy you.

Or perhaps the calculation goes to great lengths not to have babies
and Nature colludes with her?

Sorrows, ought you not commune in the dance steps you were given 
without mask or farce, then no one would be souped?
What sophisticated arts you use to demise each other
no wonder sorrow is rife yet shrinks.
Nature wrestles with its own demons.

And what of the light?

Those pillager-humans, the energy suckers that they are
hunt and harvest these sorrows
to achieve luminosity or luciferous ends.
So both depairs and calculations 
cannot migrate 
cannot adapt
cannot evolve.
Eventually

they simply

disappear.

© N Nazir 2021

*Thank you, David Attenborough, Planet Earth, BBC, National Geographic and Ecowatch.com for all the fascinating info (which I have thwarted and debunked so trust only 50%).  ‘Tis an incredible planet we inhabit.

I know this poem is too long and needs editing but I’ve got to tick off the poem for today as my day is already full.  

Thank you so much for continuing to read my work.  I appreciate it so much. ❤️
I’m definitely not one of those writers that thinks they know it all.  In fact, I sometimes cringe at my own work.  

I truly welcome any constructive feedback and comments. ☀️

NaPoWriMo Prompt: to use facts about an animal with any references to the animal itself replaced with other abstract notions, to be rearranged and edited into a poem.

http://www.napowrimo.net