Insects do not have voices: you can squash them as you like.
There is no mother tongue among them, no mama-ing murmur, no sense, no
scream.
There is no one to exhume them or investigate the case.
There is no grey physician to administer last medicine, no black priest.
There is no family weeping, no estate, no kid bug to grow up
seeking vengeange as in Lebanon or Bosnia or Northern Ireland,
finding you in crosshairs from a distance or wiring the half of London
that you haunt.
There is nothing to see or hear. No butterfly bellows. No moth squeeks.
Nobody bothers to explain to you that pain in you, however, increases with
each squash: each leaking chitin yields one pound.
Each twitching antenna, each wrenched wing, each popped eye adds up.
Each each is worth ten eaches.

You will not be stricken by malaria.
Contrarily, agony precedes irony, as curse precedes remorse, birth, rebirth.
You may suffer from contrition, penitence, nagging culpability, bald guilt.
The phalanges may flare up for a week or two from the force of their flap on
the concrete.
Eye muscles may flinch from the impact a while, the tongue feel loose within
teeth.
Nothing will, however, be totally out of sorts.
You will still be able to play tennis admirably, stroke par in golf, code
100 lines
of Fortran, satisfy your wife.
You may tithe, gain title, titillate, lick tit.
You may live and prosper, propagate until you glut the earth. You may
succeed beyond your wildest dreams.
Eventually, ah, yes eventually, some then, however, some dark then,
some lonely warren of a hunted then, some skinny wrist of a starving then,
some emaciated face with shrivelled eyes of a dying then, you will feel the
weight of those insects, ten thousand pounds of voiceless thens.
Then will those lightest insects fly away silently and leave you to your then.
Then.

–Leo Obrst

Image Credit: Kenton Forshee, Amanda Slater