[6] When You’re Hungry Enough

Grasshoppers and crickets chirp for a reason: to call a nearby mate, to celebrate having mated, to warn away a rival. That’s animal fact. That’s purpose.

A group of grasshoppers is called a cloud; a group of crickets, an orchestra. A group of canaries is a charm. Canaries were the first caged songbirds. The Spanish thought of that.

First cricket in a jar, captured by a kid who punched holes in the lid so the cricket could breathe. So they could hear the cricket sing. So they could watch the cricket die. Maybe not their intent. That’s Unexpected Consequences 101.

That’s what happens when we put things in jars, in boxes, in cages. Their songs become the songs of those not captured, those who live in a charm, in a cloud, in a roar of free verse, who sing of those encaged so no one forgets,

who sing about the depravity of captivity, the cruel disregard 
of concrete, because it has come to that, the best poems come 
when we have something 

to say and have to say it, when we find the chair, punch the keys, 
carve the pen, 

because we are calling, we are hungry, we are ravenous. 
We are warning.