The Beetle

after Jose Pacheco

You, like all of us, are what you conceal.

Inside your horned helicopter

you hide and suffer,

infamous in your exile. Prized

for your craft that we try in vain to imitate

in gold and amber,

you survive baiting, outrun and elude us,

we, your assassins, who cannot follow into the wall,

veldt of circuitry or Jacob’s ladders,

this, your solitary confinement

from which you escaped. Winged and on the run,

you entered illegally, the humblest of eaters

pursued by flashlights searching London flats,

chased into floorboards and dreaming

there to engorge yourself on chicken marrow,

hair of a woman who bought her lover’s freedom

with letterhead and forging,

lint and nail clippings,

underground palace of discarded excess.

Poor, you never sought to become a rascal,

thief, or tax evader. Your mouth hooked and clutched,

secreting a hardening cloak

as instinct instructed. No ambition

could sustain that artist in you

to fulfill the task for which you were born:

an asylum out of your own body

metamorphosing the worm

who curls in all of us who envy

such rapid success, perfected artifice

that, if an autopsy, would reveal nothing about you

that hasn’t been pestered

or riddled by schoolchildren, judges,

barbers who cannot betray your anonymity

or inform upon your green card stash.

Programmed by shadows, struck dumb yet knowing

to scuttle a deathblow missing,

you do not fear

that kind of death. You have survived it

as you reported to the benefit gala,

the pearl-strung collarbone enchanted by

your poise and sung resurrection.

Born and cradled in a ball of shit,

no longer a trespasser but a guest of honor,

you hum from a scroll

silencing the waitstaff who once pitied you

but now mutter

you were always untouchable.

Our mumbler, how you alter the story!

Who can rival you in strategic confusion?

Pest because we cannot surpass nor kill

nor ignore you.

Neither an insect nor bird,

you exist in pure imagination.

Your reputation will last

long after the house is dismantled,

its fixtures stripped and auctioned, its metal

hinges scrapped, bricks sold in a yard

then reused for respectable establishments

where the threat of your possibility

will compel precautions

though you disappear again through a ceiling crack

into the darkness with which we wall ourselves

but cannot go. How we hate you for it

and spread rumors of your disease,

though we admire your rage to outlive and,

like you, are what we conceal.