My love,
You wove words into wool;
A spider, you strung sentences into works of art;
While I, blind and blundering,
Tried to find solace in the stitching;
Thread webs into safety nets.
Yet there was perhaps a fatal flaw I forgot to mention:
I don’t know how to weave,
And I’m really ******* scared of spiders,
And time, and loss and love and you and me and most other things.
(But mostly spiders - like heart-stopping-body-spasming scared)

So, my pretty Baby blue,
I wish you and I, a doomed arachnophobe,
Could exist between the lines of love poems,
Could spend mornings in bed with tea from our favourite mugs,
Could spend nights walking home from our favourite pubs,
Could be everything I wished for us.
But life catches on and time catches up,
So for now I’ll dip my tongue in sugared coatings,
And try to lick your wounds clean.
I’ll etch your voice into vinyl, and put your track on repeat,
An album of day-to-day complaints;
Awkward stories; and the reasons you’re always right.
I’ll sit content, and sway to the rhythm of your tune,
And watch you, my friend, my baby blue,
Move, and bloom, to the unique beat of you.
And maybe you in turn, if you wouldn’t mind of course,
Could teach me not to run from spiders,
Like I always seem to do

not many people like you
because you’re the type to
crawl
not in the literal sense
but in how long it
took to overcome withdrawal

see a lot of people have it
figured out
everyone’s sized you up
they want to seize you
trap you
inside a tiny plastic cup

some people like the way you look
others are afraid
beauty in your many behaviors
many faces
many legs

it’s incredible how intricate
you weave and toil lies
sinful in the way you look
all masked with butterflies

you have this thing you do
you spin them in all directions
then wrap them tightly
as a product of perfection

stressing over
pulling all the lines in time
since no one hates a spider more
than one they cannot find

Spider webs on my feet,
tangled strings in between.
Angelic death traps,
a spiders saving grace.
Don't look at my face.

There's a spider in the corner
Spinning silk into structure
I'm repulsed by this intruder
Just the same I want to touch her

I watch her distrustingly
I must admit she frightens me
Weaving an intricate canopy
Above my ficus tree

She thinks she's safe there but instead
For fear she may drop on my head
I am going to have to **** her
Creepy, calculating, dead

Little spiders crawl on me as I try to
sleep. But I pay them no mind. They’ve
wandered around here for years,
claiming their deserved space, though
I’m sure they’ve been around long
before I moved in. I used to freak out
as their tiny legs made the trek across
one shoulder to the next and down my
arm, leaving a trail of goosebumps. It
was like a muzzle ****** to the back
of my head, or the first time soft,
caring fingers made their way across
my undressed skin. But now I could not
care less. These little ******* are
now my friendly acquaintances, and
they crawl around all they want.


-
by Aleksander Mielnikow

It’s really disheartening
The way people are being
They only love you at the beginning
And they chew you up the next thing
They spit you out after they use you
They forget everything right that you do
They take your air until you turn blue
Turns out, people are worse than you knew

It’s really disappointing
The way spiders keep you spinning
They bind you up till you’re hurting
Keep you in a shelf until they start eating
They make you wait for your death
Mercilessly, they take your last breath
What’s worse is you don’t even have a death bed
Your awake but all of you is spent

Like a lake without water
Like a pen without a paper
They left me like this, more alone than ever
I just wish I could be happier
But I promise myself, this is the last time
I’ll never again let them take what’s mine
My sanity is all that is left in my mind
And I’ll bury it somewhere even I can’t find

In tidying his garden shed he sweeps up
spiders’ webs without concern, like
so much dust and spiders too.

They wait for hours, patient as anglers,
their lines complex geometries of silk.
It takes a million years to get to this:
an hour to build a web that lasts a day;

With webs secure as safety-nets,
they lie in wait for acrobatic wasps to falter,
unsuspecting slap-stick moths to snag
their powder-wings on sticky silk…

He locks his shed.
Even as he’s walking down the path,
a ball of legs unfurls, fixes a line,
abseils down the window pane.