Gaul Wasp

Lazare Carnot sits at a desk and quill in hand
ink alighting on the page, shiny as the wings of flies
poetry comes to mind

And this is after long years of what he’d call service and duty
the pragmatist’s refrain for why dark ink bled across warrants and conscriptions and letters

The ink that trails behind his quill could only have come from crushing a wooden tumorous growth, when a small wasp stung the bark of a tree and it swells, it swells, a nursery for a solipsistic wasp-child

The gall of it all!

Lazare Carnot is not like a wasp at all.

if anything, I think he’s more like a bee, you see.
Because Europe felt the sting of the levée en masse

And yet after he was exiled from the hive
Lazare Carnot sits at a desk and quill in hand
and writes sappy poetry about cottage life.