I think the universe is a 17-year cicada brood
and a 170-year brood, and a 1700-year brood,
and a 17,000-year brood and you can add as many zeroes
as you want and never be wrong, the point
is that that the Clockwork of Eons has clicked
into extraordinary alignment
and all the broods are hatching at once, despite
the scientific consensus being that the ancient prophecies
of the Great Cicada Brood Alignment
were mere mythical claptrap, the folklore of fools
who see mystical schemes in constellations and ruins,
and we could protest all day about how 99.999%
of all cosmological belief systems truly are delusional
but our voices would be drowned out by the screaming,
the primordial screaming from the trees,
the bushes, the skies, the air itself, the cicadas
are atoms, they are stars, wheeling
in Fibonacci spirals that are never quite perfect,
always a bit awry of the diagrammatic ideal,
“They are just like us,” we say to ourselves,
“feeling all the feelings at the time time,
seeking each other, trying to line it all up”–