ARACHNECIDE JUSTIFIED

Spider why

Stray into my shower-box

Dark, in the pre dawn ?

- Shaded with my unillumined fears

Of things beneath the bed,

Around the corner of my grown maturity.

Naked in a chilly morning,

Shivering wet-fleshed in my shower-spray, up I looked

And froze:

Trapped in the splashing water heat,

The blanketing clouds of steam,

Large - on my ceiling, overhead

You quivered;

Disdaining gravity’s demand in confident contention

With your eight legs spread secure.

Reassured you’d soon retreat

To refuge in your dry dark hiding place,

My calmness too returned

With watered warmth, yet watching still.

But as you sensed the moisture-weighting risk

In protest did you raise one anchoring foot

And then another, till you FELL !

Web-slowed, leg-spread in your descent toward my feet !

- my panic flinging me outside

- to stand soap-dripping in my angry fear

- to see you scramble round

Shower-drop confused and frightened on my shower-box floor.

What choice had I, but desperate defence by aerosol ?

(- as thoughtless of the ozone layer’s loss as you had been)

Smothering your legs,your head, your jaws

In poisoned suffocating fear until you stumbled,

Now malfunctioned in your heaving arcs,

Turned in tighter silent-gasping circles,

Wound down and locked into your leg-clenched toxic death.

Why ?

We could have co-existed in my house;

Warily esteeming all your craft and skilled co-ordination

As I do :

But your folly was to so

Intrude into the shadow of my childhood fears,

Your trespass danger to my clothed and certain years.

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G D Bolton                 1978