This Place

Sleep is my only connection to this place.
And the spiders.
 
A Spider holds dominion now.
She spins a story and makes it a palace.
She weaves a dream and binds me in silk,
frosty veils clog my throat, my nostrils.
 
She rests outside a lone window,
Eyes grander than the faces ensnared in her gaze.
She sees the whole of the world with just a glimpse.
A garland of flesh and bones crowns her head.
Her mandibles click lyrically.
 
But she only brushes past me
in search of more luscious prey.
Slender legs pluck on webs composing the finest song.
Her carapace striped in blond and brown.
Razors lined her long, lithe form,
so sharp that even a casual glance draws blood,
blooming
like jam spread on toast,
sunset upon a cloud,
a dying star exploded across the ether.
 
Beneath her web, wanton boys pluck wings off a dragonfly.
 
The mattress has a loose spring that jabbed at my liver.
 
Upstairs a bed crackled to and fro,
this place the spider entangles, queen
of a lonely archipelago.
 
They make the ceiling shake.
It is not the unrelenting noise that riles,
but the monotony,
and the synchronized snoring that follows.
The rumble begins at eleven pm, sharp
and goes on for precisely eighteen minutes,
timely like pistons on a train.
And the snoring lasts through the rain.
 
In the morning I will meet them in the hall.
Shall I greet them then, with a wink and a smile?
Greet them as the stranger who has heard them all?
Greet them as the intimate stranger who has known them all?
 
And we will swarm together into the courtyard,
onto the streets, bike lanes, metros, treadmills,
out of this dry valley,
ascending marbled steps glossed hour to hour
by rough hands once too caressed by a spider,
before they got old too fast, too old for stories.
 
And we will swarm together, at the orange hour,
packed like words in bad prose,
swaying with forced symmetry,
grinding against each other,
hands groping for air,
eyes each to each,
ankles muddied by a thousand feet marching
in lockstep, herded by neckties, carrions of Monday.
 
I shall greet them all, then, smiling ear to ear.
In the morning I shall meet them all,
with a wink and a smile.
 
Raindrops stray into windows the size of eyes
that gazed at a fractal sky,
and into the home of the old man who lives next door,
on the second floor, alone.  
During the day he plays the radio rather loudly so the world could hear,
he reads newspapers all day on the balcony,
while puffing smoke like a chimney.
Never mind the cough and the bad lung.
He dangles his foot on the ledge where the sun is last to set,
where he airs tattered socks and yellowed underwear.
 
This place.
Long, cylindrical,
Walls arms apart, papered with varicose vines that oozed green,
curtained from the world with silk and iron,
half a dream, half a ruin.
 
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