This Is the Time of Grasshoppers and All That I See Is Dying

Colleen, this is the time of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my virulent love for you. The Cowturdville Star-Times, which usually has a typo in every damn column, says the grasshoppers this year “are as big as Buicks” and that’s not bad, but then we get two eight-point pages of who had dinner with whom at the bowling alley café and who went shopping at Target in Rapid City and thus the high church of Adrian the Obscure is sacked. Even my old Dylan tapes are fading, becoming near-comic antiques. The grasshoppers are destroying our yard and they’re as big as my middle finger saluting God. The grass is yellow. The trees look like Agent Orange has hit but it’s only the jaw-work of those drab armored insects who dance in profusion and pure destruction. Sweet woman, dear love of my life, when you’re not angry and sputtering at everything and everyone, you become so childlike, so pure. Your voice seems to have grown higher recently, almost a little-girl pitch. Today, like most days, I have you home for your two-hour reprieve from the nursing home prison. We’re sitting at the picnic table in the backyard staring at the defoliation of lilacs, brain matter, and honeysuckle. You’re eating a Hershey Bar and a crystal glob of snot is hanging from your nose. I reach over, pinch it off, and wipe it on my jeans. You thrust the last bite of chocolate into my mouth as a demented grasshopper jumps onto your ear. You scream. I howl with laughter until you do too. Happiness comes with a price. This is the times of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my swarming love for you. Last night on PBS some lesioned guy being screwed to death by legions of viral invisibility blurted the great cliché of regret: I wish I could be twenty again and know what I know now … My own regrets are equally foolish. And, I wonder, how the hell is it I’ve reached a place where I’d give what’s left of my allotment of sunsets and frozen dinners for some unholy replay of just one hour in some nearly forgotten time and place? Darling, in the baked soil of the far west, I first saw the ant lions, those hairy little bugs who dug funnel traps for ants in the dry earth. At twelve, looking over the edge of one such funnel surrounded by a circle of tiny stones in the sand, I aimed a beam of white light from my magnifying glass and found I could re-create a hell of my own accord. Poverty and boredom made me cruel early on. The next summer while digging postholes I found a cache of those grotesque yellow bugs we called Children of the Earth so I piled matches atop them and barbecued their ugliness. I was at war with insects. In my fifteenth summer I got covered with ticks in the sagebrush and that fall I nervously lost my cherry in a cathouse called the Green Front and got cursed with crabs but that’s not what I want to sing about at all… come on now. This is no bug progression. This ain’t no insect sonata. This is only misdirection, a sleight of hand upon the keys and the unholy replay of just one hour in some nearly forgotten time and place that I’d like to return to will remain myth or maybe a holy, tumescent mystery. And let’s not call these bloodwords POETRY or a winter count of desperate dreams when reality is much simpler. Colleen, I swear to Christ this is the time of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my sparkling love for you.