"'Eleodes Armata.'
Where to begin with you, pinacatte beetle,
the signature headstand you strike
to spray noxious fluid in self-defense,
your femoral spines, sensitive antennae,
or the hollows beneath wings you do not use, for you prefer
to stroll the desert keep low near rotting
fruit and leaves and seeds the ants discarded in their dump
sites
Perhaps your treatment in film deserves mention how you're fit
to be spat on fit to be squashed by the likes of Clint Eastwood
and Gian Maria Volanté, whose fist collapsed your exoskeleton
as Mortimer's round would crush his chest in the final showdown
of For A Few Dollars More
You deserve an Oscar best supporting role along
with the velvet mesquite and palo verde
from which this nation hung its founding myths--
tough, pretty whores the red man who
captures them the noble cowboy meting out justice
Here lies our Western manifesto destined
to find the level of your mandible,
an outlaw history kicking, jerking at the end of a rope
its windpipe crushed by its own weight
Pinacate, together with your cousins,
the fungus beetle the root borer you return the lynching tree
to the land you love to walk and feed
upon, your kind makes up one-third
of all animal life on Earth
My God.
There you go, ambling past saguaros like a 57
Chevy on the main drag,
[LAUGHTER]
John Wayne's got nothing on your true grit,
you know when to hole up wait out the heat
when to point your thorax at an unwelcome guest
and fire the six-gun
[LAUGHS]
They call you stinkbug, darkling,
but we are extras in your mythology,
when empty strip malls bear witness to the limits
of our collective sight you and your kith will be
our demolition team, you undertake with quiet confidence
tear down through countless generations what cannot last,
plant eggs in arid soil unhurried as you prepare
the ground for your beginnings.
[APPLAUSE]