WANT NOT/ “TASTE NOT”
Death
wants more ‘death’, and its webs are full:
I remember my father's garage, how child-like
I would brush the tiny corpses of flies
from the static windows they thought were
lucid escape-routes-
their sticky, repulsive, vibrant bodies
shouting like dumb-crazy dogs
against the glass,
only to spin and flit
in that very second,
larger than hell or heaven,
onto the edge of the ledge…
and then the spider, from his dank hole,
nervous and exposed:
the puff of pitchy body;
swollen, silky, hanging there,
not really quite knowing,
but then (again) so ever knowing-
something sending it
down its own string,
the wet weave of a web,
toward the weak shield of buzzing,
the pulsing;
a last desperate, moving hair-leg
there against the glass,
there alive in the sun,
spun in a white cocoon;
and almost like love:
the closing over,
the first hushed spider-sucking:
form-filling its ample sack
from this thing that lived;
crouching there upon its back
drawing its certain blood
as the world goes by (outside)
much like disinterested traffic
and my temples screech for mobility …
and I hurl the broom against them:
the spider full of spider-anger,
still thinking of its precious prey
and waving an amazed broken leg;
the fly very, very still,
a dirty speck stranded to straw;
I shake the killer loose
and he walks lame and peeved
towards some dark, dusty corner
but I slyly intercept his dawdling,
his wounded crawling like some broken hero,
and the broom-straws smash his legs,
now waving sheepishly
above his head
and he’s looking…
looking for the enemy;
yet… he seems rather valiant,
dying without apparent pain;
simply crawling backward,
piece by piece by piece…
leaving nothing there, until,
at last, the ruby-red gut-sack
(he wears aloft) splashes
its buried steamy secrets,
and I run child-like
with God's fury a step behind,
back to simple sunlight,
wondering …wondering
as the world goes by
(with curled smile),
if anyone else actually
saw, or sensed, my "caring" crime.
Adapted from Death Wants More Death; a poem by Charles Bukowski
