Butter, Fly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“My love is like a butterfly,” he says.
Ha! More like buttered flies, I think,
another desperate rutter seeking praise,
a glitter-flitter now and then ablaze,
soon slumped.

All crooning’s done. The flutter-by? He stays
stuck to my sheets a-snore and live stars sink
as daylight blooms; the swanky admiral splays
its comma-ed wings over the rose’s gaze,
much pumped

up by this dope’s dreary, muttering ways.
I’ll give them futtering flattery, trying to slink
past my aesthetic eye! The stink I’ll raise
before they blink means one’ll be dead in days,
one dumped!


Oi! Why’ve you flipped me out of bed
and left me floored? I’m not a pile of trash
for you to chuck, not scraps for you to shred
to rags. My wings are clipped? So you’ve said.
We’ll see.

I live to love wherever I lay my head;
it won’t be here again. You’re much too flash,
can’t trap me in your raging coils. I’ll spread
my wings then quit your plotted ways. Instead,
I flee,

I flit your hearth fire and your homely bread
for tulips’ belling blooms, their flags a-splash
with rain that dribbles deft where reds are shed,
where stamens shiver spry. To me, you’re dead.
I'm free.


So, like the butterfly they touch and part,
ephemeral as the day in God’s long sight
(let’s lop the ‘metaphys.’ a mite; depart
from Johnson’s catch-all tripe. This time, we’ll chart
what’s true;

the thrust of conceits. They’re images at heart,
though Donne has Mannered up the form with light-
weight loves and maunderings entwined to impart
a sense of higher things. It’s all art
all askew!

Enough! Our pair’s in view.), they fly, each smart-
ing from the other’s taunts, afield, one right,
one gone, each pursued by Love’s cruel dart,
did they but know it - all lovers end apart.
Adieu.