Monarchs

No, not him again. True, they both have a thing for Mexico and favor orange with darkness around their edges, but the ones I’m thinking of have wings and they flap across the border, undocumented. As far as I know none are rapists.

Our subspecies potentate just prances around his gold-gilt bathrooms eyeing spigots and hurls verbal spitballs or gets ridden around the greens putting balls into holes.

Aside from all the other ills of this fragile planet, monarch butterflies are facing eviction from their winter home. The next time your order avocado toast, think again. The fir trees where millions go to cuddle in the winter, are being systematically cut down. Farmers on that land are planting avocado trees in their place. There is no money in butterflies but Mexico produces 80% of the world’s guacamole which fed sports fans while watching the World Cup. There were more tree stumps left than goals scored.

Here I am, trying to catch the butterfly of the moment even though the best I can do is note all the flutterbys I failed to net. Why butter, I wonder? Flutter is better than butter, so say I and now I know the answer though I wish I could withdraw the question: Because their excrement looks like butter says Google, as if it were flying cows. From now on I’ll take my toast dry, thank you, and that could be my butterfly moment with patterns made by my toaster oven on the low-carb, high fiber Keto bread, but hold the excrement, and besides what other species is named after their poop, I ask you?

Monarchs migrate 3,000 miles from eastern Canada to the High Sierras in Mexico. However it takes 4-5 generations for a round trip. They feast on toxic milkweed. Apparently, one creature's poison is another's banquet. Predators find out that monarchs are devoutly to be avoided.

They are defenseless, however, against human predators with our nets and pins. We seem to have cultivated predation into an artform. I can’t imagine that butterflies enjoy being pinned. After all, life is short enough orchestrating their choreography among the wildflowers. Their lifespan is about 6-8 weeks. They must die of exhaustion, a week being a decade but who's counting?

I wonder if their brief days are a frenzy or are there patterns, as in toast, we can't see? Jesus, is that you, Jesus or is it Walt Whitman? To be permitted to hold my gaze into those leaves of grass if only for a split nanosecond, seems to me a better use of butter as they flutter by. Put me on the wings of the lepidoptera as it dreams of its past life as a caterpillar, then a chrysalis; always on the verge of its next incarnation.