[stylist] Poem - "A Spider"

[Miss Thea]

I love the tactile use of language, Bill.
Unfortunately, my flesh is crawling now.
I'll have to write something furry to get rid of that feeling.
But it is powerful
I see the remorse, and yet the reasoning: You didn't mean to kill her, yet 
you felt bad.
I'm an insect-phobe though, so I'll have to wash. LOL
In Englishk, you made a pretty powerful impression on me.
Thea

-----Original Message----- 
From: William L Houts
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 9:57 AM
To: Writer's Division Mailing List
Subject: [stylist] Poem - "A Spider"

Hi Peeps,

Here's something I just dug up from one of my older, creakier poetry
folders.  I wrote this sometime in my twenties, and I think it still
works.  OH hell, why don't I just say it:  I'm in love with this poem
and wouldn't edit it dfor a mint, LOL.  I've written a few poems about
spiders, as I love the hideous little monsters somewhat, but this is
probably the best.  Comments welcome, as always.


--Bill


---


Sprawled in my favorite chair,
I  found a spider striving down
my sweater's cotton roads;
uncruel, I meant to brush her
from my collar to the floor,
but a brainless finger crushed her.

Drunk on ideas the size of salt,
her witty legs, those marvelous legs
had skittered her down the wall

to vistas of heaving; the ebb
and flo of my breathing.

A ruined husk.  I didn't reckon
the difference between our lives,
the stellar gap between a spider's
life and mine:  and this was my task,
for if it exists, a reckoning spider is
truly a monster, a foe to be fought.

But she was no monster,
and I was only a man in a chair,
reading, with no ill intent:  and yet
that tiny walker died, a small
color in the world gone to gray

at my blameless finger's end.




















-- 
"Let's drink a toast now to who we really are."

           --Jane Siberry

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