Three Poems About Spiders and Insects

Strings

It hangs, silent in

the darkness between

chrome and grey.

Patient eyes, unbound

without self-awareness,

waiting above resting 

needles.

It crouches upon itself

as it hangs inverted, 

clinging to a web of 

irregular madness.

It's pitch body, darker than tar,

spotted with the dire red

of fear, is shrouded 

in the shadows of it's home.

It cannot see the lonely

cricket as it wanders below.

Stopping, going, stopping, going.

One wrong step, it blunders into

a sticky thread which clings to it

as though it were a lost child 

which as found its mother. 

Pulled into the air,

the predator finally 

acknowledges the crickets existence.

Up, up, up to active fangs, 

watching eyes, working legs.

Within reach, silk shrouds 

a desperate cricket moments before

death is delivered through one 

well placed bite.

Latrodectus hesperus

Acheta domesticus 

From the Beginning

It has been this way from the beginning.

Seemingly unchanging, seeming 

to defy its own evolution.

Two long, elegant wings 

carry it through the air in 

its endless search for 

nutrients.

97% of the mosquitoes it sets its eyes on

will never breathe again.

Born from water, it climbed 

up the stalk of a young

grass stem where it cracked

its very own skin in one final

effort to free itself 

from the shrinking prison which
held it for so long.

Anax junius

The Running Sun 

If people know anything about it,

it is that is is to be feared.

Large slicing jaws which 

tear into skin and camels 

and deliver poison and 

kill pets. 

This is not what they are.

They are only what they are,

simple survival in harshest

conditions adult men shun.

Speeding across the sands 

in search of shades, afraid 

of the rays of the sun.

Solifugae