Hi Glenn,
It's definitely more arresting starting with the old 3rd stanza, but then you do lose the description of the suffering.
I wonder if a single first stanza describing that suffering might be worth trying. Maybe (or on second thoughts, maybe not!) even drawing on a different simile drawn from the human world. "Like office/factory drudges", say. No doubt there's something better than that ... Maybe you could use a slime/grime rhyme, even.
I also wonder if, when you've described the long difficult years of suffering and the brief glorious hour of joy, you'd even need final couplet contrasting the two. Perhaps the reader could be left to draw the conclusion themselves?
Like fashion models, flashing gauzy wings,
unable to eat, they flirt and mate and fly,
embrace an hour of hedonistic flings,
then, starved and spent, emptied of eggs, they die.
Personally, I'm happy that mayflies are like fashion models only insofar as they don't eat and have gauzy wings. I don't think "fashion model" has to apply to the rest of the sentence. They do the rest of those things in they style of fashion models -- or while resembling fashion models -- but this sense is lost when you split the stanza into two sentences. Hence I prefer the one-sentence version.
However, "unable to eat" still bugs (sic) me, since fashion models are able to eat and do. Hence my suggestion that you replace that with "eschewing food". Besides making the simile sound inaccurate (to me), "unable to eat" seems a little too dull and functional, especially after "flashing gauzy wings. I guess, "and fasting hard" might work and would give you another 'f' sound. Another option might be "living on air" for some wordplay.
best,
Matt
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