An Apiarist

Ordered, golden orchard of budding umbilical pathways / Groomed and manicured with subservient hands / We few custodians strain in restless industry / Cloistered within stark and feverish walls Mask, tool, and smoker shouldered in labor / A daily pilgrimage of excremental mud / Toward the shrine of squat and droning hives / Clockwork wings in swelling chorus I had begun to loathe the trees in their luster / Blooming perpetual, incense and sulphur / Fruit dripping from gnarled, alveolar branches like the limbs of a sunken and tubercular harvest queen Once I rose in stealth to walk by fading starlight along the edge of a sleeping canal / Peering through the cataract of sweating, claustrophobic pre-dawn darkness smothering its banks I knelt at the water’s edge / Fixated on the silhouette / Reflected in the onyx surface / As it shuddered slowly into form Faint glow caught like a handful of bees, stinging, dead in my palm / Great soiled aurora advancing, slick like oil smeared across anemic skies Its luminous tendrils slithered across the rooftops/ To light this boundary, a curtain of glass / The face that rippled, recoiling below me / The stricken visage of a familiar and monstrous parasite I bent, weeping, to drink from the canal / The blood which I knew was of my host / Beyond the vein unfurled an open landscape whose exquisite austerity would not abide my existence.

Submitted by Morgoth — Nov 15, 2025