A writer sits down to work, and something is already eating the work. Mike Stone's "Millipede" opens on that small, absurd image: millipede and small spiders nibbling at the pages "while I write them." The joke lands in the next line, "They can't even wait til I'm published," but the poem is only warming up. In a dozen lines it travels from a bug-ridden desk to a quiet confession about what it costs to be human.
The hinge is the one-word line "Prehumously." It is an invented adverb, a twist on "posthumously," the word we use for fame that arrives after death. Normally time wears a writer's work away once the writer is gone. Here the decay has started early, before the book even exists. The comedy lies in the pompous *-ously* ending bolted onto something so scruffy. But the coinage also contains "human," a word that is thought to share an ancient root with "humus," the soil that millipedes live in and help to make. So the word can be heard as "pre-human," and that prepares the ground for what follows. Left alone on its line, it also works like a punchline, with silence on either side for the laugh.
The next two lines turn the joke into an aphorism: "It is easier to learn to be perfect / than it is to learn to be human." The grammar is balanced, with "learn to be" repeated on both sides, so the only thing that changes is the final word. Perfection is something you can *learn*, a skill with steps and practice. Being human is not. The opening has already shown what it involves: being interrupted, being half-eaten, leaving pages that are not intact. A page the spiders have nibbled is no longer perfect, and the poem seems to suggest that this is exactly the point.
The last stanza is one sentence unrolling over four lines. "I knew I was in trouble" is plain and offhand, the voice of someone admitting a bad habit. Then comes the vocabulary: "obsessed," "algorithm," "encoding." Computing language sits oddly after nibbling spiders. The ambitions are enormous, since love and consciousness are the two things people have found hardest to explain, and the speaker wants to "discover" a formula for one and "encode" the other. The verbs are telling. To discover an algorithm is to assume love has a hidden recipe, and to encode consciousness is to assume a mind can be copied into rules. The sentence also ends on its heaviest word, "consciousness," as if the speaker were wading into deeper water with each line.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm comes from line length. A long, prose-like first line gives way to a short one, then to a single word, then to a measured pair, and finally to the stepping-stone lines of the last sentence. The first stanza is full of soft, small sounds (the *m* and *l* of "millipede," the hiss of "small spiders nibble"), which seem to mimic tiny jaws at work. "Nibble" is a gentle, almost polite verb for an act of destruction. Judging by the imagery, the pages are physical, and that matters. Paper can be eaten, but code cannot. One might even hear a pun the poem never states: the creatures on the desk are literal bugs, in a poem about someone who dreams in software.
What makes "Millipede" worth reading is how much it fits into so few lines without losing its humour. It lets the small creatures win the argument. The speaker wants a clean, solvable version of love and mind, and the poem answers with creatures who are indifferent to ambition and simply feed on what is there. Being human, it implies, means being open to decay, interruption and imperfection, and that cannot be coded away. For a reader today, surrounded by talk of optimising everything, the poem's little warning is easy to remember: perfection may be the easier thing to learn, and the poem treats that as the danger.