untitled circa summer '04

A silver compact vehicle crushed nearly flat where its engine should have been,
reduced to half its original length,
collapsed like some concertina, hand accordion, or other corrugated thing,
painted dull silver and crushed into asymmetrical lopsided folds—
as if spiders under the influence of LSD grew hands and made origami projects
in art class with the other children instead of uneven spiderwebs.

What would teacher say to the spider become a little girl,
who spoke the silently rendered language of the arachnidae better than standard English,
who alarmed other kids with his-her propensity to catch houseflies with his-her hands, pulling the wings off the fly on the desk.

The child who brooded in the corner and who didn’t answer questions,
whose most natural thoughts turned retrospectively to the egg it shared with the other little ones,

and who thinks tribe when others think eggs, who fears chickens and robins,
can’t comprehend the size of dogs and horses, and enjoys being zapped by electrical appliances in the dark.

Who cannot comprehend the surface of his-her own skin or why there aren’t more tentacles or fingers jutting forth.
Who intuitively understands construction sites and instruments scooping the earth,
who envies the pneumatic appendages of the earth-movers or any appendage
from which extends smaller, more precise ones,

like Swiss knives unfolding into awls and corkscrews,
or finer ciliations meant to filter impurities from sluggish water or sting predator or prey.
The logic of the spider moves down a hierarchy of appendages,
arms or legs or shafts or pincers, bear-claws, nails or other cutaneous extensions
or exoskeletons, all moving from the blunt to the specified.
The spider is in natural sympathy with automobile engines, with engine-blocks halved or jogged apart.