“It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.”
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
I. CEPHALOTHORAX
It’s fitting to write in this darkness. Faux darkness. Farkness.
My spider left me last week.
Some write by candlelight, a lingering ‘urnt triggering sense of place. Their mise-en-scene is trad-writer, all the rage on book-tok and writer-stagram (substack). I write by the turdy light of sharty cinema. Some slasher about shoppers getting stabbed next to cereal. A cat in a coffin. I type and see anthill hieroglyphs. Words becoming waves. Sentences look like stamps.
I can’t hear my own voice in my head. Instead the ringing sound of continuing continuance sings to me my memories. I look back in every direction to see my future. The long road, a necktie. Whiny, windy, mistakenly formal. The short path, a necklace. Hammered silver thumbprints dangling identification. Somewhere 40 cities south a friend of mine spends ten days in silence. I hope they don’t hear me talking about them.
The spider is a wow of independence. Fierce unwieldy appendage. Misty bent stick. Twisted poses speaking heartfelt love languages – horror, confusion, guilt.
Spiders scare me.
I drove an hour up a cliffside single lane in the hopes of throwing a music festival at some old cobweb commune. Along the spindle road I dreamed of hairy hippies, acid in mind, booze in belly, river in clearview, wrong turning to demise. I stopped the station wagon on the side of an illegal weed grow.
A double quarter sized black widow swung straight through my window and held home in my eyeline. If I told you I squeal-jumped to a corner in my trunk you would have to believe me. If I understood this as omen enough not to stay and play there, so too will you hear my truth. I crumbled as my copilot slept drunkenly. The dwindling beast disappeared and the rest of our road trip was haunted by the threat of reemergence.
I witnessed alien adoration and shivered. A mountain shrieking at a pebble. My entire life is a failure for reality. An honest but abstractly strung fable.
My mind betrays its vision. Dream theory says the spider is a reminder, a sign. Spirit theory says patience, creativity and fate. They show themself to us so that we might see what we aren’t. The real world can’t be so different. Not for those chasing (dreams or theories). Every vision is a spider. All objects are eight legs.
II. CHELICERAE
A brown recluse sucked a hole onto my shin and I blamed a scratchy toenail. This could have been a kiss of death. It was simply a six month scab. That spider gave me life. A chance to meet a really lazy physician. A temporary tattoo. Gory photos of someone else’s pain. Bitten empathy. Prickled self pity.
The peeled yellow edges of our home are a fly buffet. The street lights, a casino nest of spider slots. Two plants hang and watch me naked in the shower. One is a beard and the other an entrance. I close my eyes, rinsing to reminisce.
Lemon unwound from the scratched black poke of the shower ceiling and hung so I noticed. Instinctually I eked. A silent shriek. Nervous hush. We had met before. Certain springs and some other summers. Once while I shaved my chin.
I ignored them. They held the corner. I held the soap. It seemed silly to hangout. The best we got for bugs in the bathroom would be an accidental gnat using an open window as an exit. Perhaps this was a hunger strike.
Some days the spider sat. Shrunken statue. Origami standstill. I must have looked like hell. Dripping wet nude nature swiping rain and thunder mere inches from their horizon.
I awake in a tent in the Sierras, lighting striking closer and closer to the wet embers of a fire we scared stories in front of. I blink. I awake on a ski slope, crashes of snow screaming under the skis I forget to put on. Cold unclothed terror. I blink. I awake walking a street of scrabble trash and tip-tap-blink-blink streetlights, days of dirt caked, cracked and bloody on my chest. I blink.
III. PEDIPALPS
Lemon arrived for their final performances a few days before Christmas. Their confidence had grown to a full half dollar of life. Each leg looked bent at eight extra knees. Swiveled seatless folded chairs. Inexact.
I was incapable. My eyes couldn’t shrink. My mouth looked like a body. Rubbery tubes deflating down fur shored rapids. White water rocks foamed with charcoal mint. We both wore makeup.
Lemon walked showboat style on the wall above my head. I closed my eyes and drank pissing heat on my lids, losing sight of the tiptoe tapdance. I shoved soap in my spaces. I am never clean enough, always an accumulation. We tried telekinesis. I can’t speak spider so we spoke like a show.
I curl, stick, twist and accept. Incompletion. Languageless. Whispered. I heard myself climb and rest. Hang out and hammock. I curl, stick, twist and accept.
I have regretfully murdered many spiders with an impassioned dismissal. Like deleting a sentence of unique meaning, I vanquished novels. Lemon was fearless, working their string pole, twirling, holding. Shadow guts stained their stage. A cemetery painting of past performance. A theater showing old show posters at entrance promenade.
The shower is my entrance to day and night, the starting line, gunshot says go. Weaved all at once, everything inside the fluorescent future. Dayless. Waiting. Nightless. Waiting. Half assed mammalian fishery.
Poor at construction, Lemon never showcased a web. The audience were slivers of old goat soap and unscrubbed dust. I might be the auditorium. In a pinhole squint I saw their boudoir.
Love the spider. Love yourself.
IV. SPINNERET
We are monsters. Drenched pristine digits. Harvestmen. Gyrating angels. Unexploded missiles. Thin snappy lines. Conversational spin and spun. Bellowed stretchy compliments. Bravo. Bravo. Bravo.
Lemon’s figure was strong limbering aerobic architecture. Whirling like wild spike. Earthy poked growling. Gardening. Growing. My attention was saddled to the scraped butter wall. Intimate inanimate object. It felt dirty, my four fingers rubbing the climb of century old stairs.
Hovering above the coliseum bath, a micro tit-tit-plit-tit-plit of 27 streams spit spray onto my shoulder. Legs lifted triplicate. Lemon dropped nearer and nearer to all parts of our apparatus. Sketchbooks filled with invisible ink. We had never been closer.
The last moments of knowing filled us up with why, a question we wouldn’t answer. Thrusting down a curtain pole. Tender tucks barely touching must scented towels. I cleaned slowly and sighed. Deep breathing dinner daydreams.
I can’t forget that show.
Fountaining skyscraper. Thunderous pondering. Towering inquisition. Lemon laughed as I lied. They knew they were leaving. I met the silence whistling goodbye for just a night. I forgot to give applause.
Our moment will live only as a conclusion. Every act was an ending. A week later and they’re still not there. A month more and mostly the fade away is what is clear. I am empty alongside what I am missing. How hard I want to hug that hole. It was never my spider.
“When did the lemons learn the same creed as the sun?”
-Pablo Neruda-
…thanks to for helping me see what was or wasn’t here, and the poetry of what remained…and most of all thanks to Lemon…it was nice to know you, or to at least pretend that i did…
your juicy rich layered language and the love of lemon the spider, joy and a wild ride this piece. keep wanting to see you performing this live, maybe with a backup band or at least an upright bass.
... hahaha... maybe we're half spiders, after all... 2 arms, 2 legs... still, i think we're unspiders, even though we built the largest web... we cannot make silk, but our lies can be just as sticky...