Insectual

Cochineal is made from an insect. Every pound weight of this valuable drug is said to contain 70,000 insects boiled to death; so that the annual sacrifice of insectual life to procure our scarlet and crimson dyes amounts to about 49,000,000 of these minute members of the vast creation.

The remembrance of those horrible nights, which were for the most part sleepless, makes us even now shudder, varied only, as they were, by occasional volleys of curses from the men, upon all our persecutors, both human and insectual, if we may coin a word.

Fussy and ‘pompious’ Tumblety Bug seemed to say with Senator Benton, when he moved the celebrated Jackson ‘Expunging Resolutions:’ ‘Solitary and alone, I set this ball in motion!’ That ‘was so,’ too: but while we pondered upon the object of the humbugeous, insectual laborer, lo! he vanished from our sight, ‘and we saw him no more.’

Spirit of the Pities. / Yonder, that swarm of things insectual / Wheeling Nowhither in Particular— / What is it? / Spirit of the Years. / That? Oh that is merely one / Of those innumerous congeries / Of parasites by which, since time began, / Space has been interfested.

Other times its horns proceed, slow yellow yearnings to live, they go eclipsed, delousing insectual nightmares dead to thunder, herald of genesis.

He watches a small bulldozer build uniform piles of dust and sand. There is something insectual about the machine’s efforts, a formician predetermination that Michael finds soothing.

Insects were now awake and playing between the pine branches and the leaf drift. Sarah wished she could live like them, stick herself to a mate, to dance, an ooze of pollen and insectual fluids, then to split apart, deseaming, done.

They are wings, insectual and diaphanous, a wasp, a hornet, a stinging winging thing that can inject venom into you over and over and over again until your bloodstream fills with the stuff and it begins to dissolve your muscles and makes your tendons pull and contract as they stiffen and draw in a rictus that snaps the very bones they are attached to.