June Bugs

Those little beige or brown bastards drunk on late spring night air dive-bombing you on the porch when you try to read or write and smoke and drink. Slow and dumb and drunk like maybe little insect cows coming around to fuck with you while not even really being aware of you. All haphazard and zagging drawn by the porch light you call your friend and hitting your cheek or head with a thump. And when you slap them out of the middling space with a notebook or open hand, they lay still as dead where they fall but sometimes stagger down the front steps. And then more come to party at the light, cutting the air in side to side or up and down crossings to assault your person and impatience. Sometimes they sound like incoming choppers and remind you of old MASH episodes. And other times you read your book or magazine piece and catch a close-up sideways glance at one of those little fuckers perched on your shoulder like a pirate's parrot or some goddamned thing. And you cuss and holler and flail at yourself like maybe you've been too long away from drink. And even though you aren't the self-conscious type, you hope the neighbors aren't watching through the slats of their blinds.

And sometimes when you visit the porch in daylight to pick up your books or papers or empties you see leftover willow-wisp wings on the mottled ground where those goddamned June bugs last lay when you slapped them out of the crowded space between you and solitude. You sweep with the thrust of an old broom those willow-wisps and wonder why are there only wings and not the whole stupid drunk dead beetle cousins. Did maybe a bird or cat or some other thing take the rest of them away during those quick hours before sunrise? Did maybe the ugly drunk flying things walk away from the waning pulse of their wings? Wander into the yard?

And who cares really where their stilled corpses lit? Bastards. Dive-bombing you. Making you look and feel like a fool alone on your porch at night. The neighbors probably watching and laughing at the silent cursing man, his arms in a seizure of pretend calm, defenseless against the night terrors he knows too intimate.