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Maybe I'll die.
Maybe I'll live
In your hands for a
While. I'm too small
To just call out the order
“Cherish me, soft, full of paint.”
Oh, the murder is nothing but a twitch:
Without hate (a cow's tail), without fear
(a foot
Sunk bare in the grass), just an itch
and its crackling
Satisfaction. As I land, all on
impulse (to wick from your
Sweet-oil salt-water skin), you will rend me or set me air-borne
With a brush before you know me.
My God – you are beyond my understanding .
Your horror, your grace
(your reaction at all) makes my feet feel thunderous just
landing.
killed a spider a while back. Some I let go; some I strike. They always leave a mark.
ReplyDelete*(Yeah, sure: you can tie her into this too, if you want to. But she was more just a spur on my impulse to write today – and also my thought for the first 4 lines. But then my mind was full of spiders, and she only coloring the ether of awe surrounding that helplessness and terror. And whose skin - hers? And who the bug before that incomprehensible judge - me? Yes, maybe a little. Okay, maybe it's not just about me killing spiders – or at all.)
When I initially read this it immediately reminded me of the emotional trauma found while having a crush. I've always found the word "crush" as being appropriate due to the fact that it forces you to expose yourself to the ambiguity of others' feelings. You feel small compared to this person because they have the ability to accept or reject every painstaking second of emotion that you have expelled on them. There's a constant feeling of uncertainty that teeters on whether or not the person reciprocates feelings and/or how they react to your feelings. You soak up everything that the person does and can only hope that they do the same to you. So anyways I found it quite humorous when I read that this poem was about a spider; perhaps I was just overanalyzing a bit. But then again the apprehension towards the end of your comment tells otherwise...
ReplyDeleteI often differentiate between the "subject/speaker" and the "spur" of a poem.
DeleteThis poem was spurred by my killing of a spider -- and only then imagining its perspective -- within the larger context of my life: pining after some girl who I've since forgotten, and thinking how fair it would be if she did dismiss me like an insect (with no malice or preoccupation -- even as crushing and violent as it might feel on my end).
So that dual-spur yielded a dual speaker: myself, in the mind of an insect I had just crushed (moved to empathetic understanding by the girl I was so impotently crushing on).