I witnessed a murder tonight.
It was Frost’s design.
Innocent moth,
fluttering about on his own
way, chanced
into the silky web outside my office
window and stuck
sticky, gooey, razor-thin
threads from the spider’s innards
struggle
struggle
the worse it gets, and the hungry
murderer approaches, faster
and faster with those eight
legs, beady eyes, sweating
fangs.
The phone rings—it’s Ben.
"Sorry,
I’m not home right now, I’m walking into
spider webs,
leave a message and I’ll call you back."
"A likely story," thinks
Ben. With morbid fascination,
I ignore the phone and watch
the tiny monster
pounce and crawl over his
victim. Sting and stab with venom.
My eyes trapped
watching Madson and Bundy and Dahmer
on the 6 o’clock news
with the plane
crash, and I slow down to rubber-
neck the accident on rt.
417, and I come running
that morning my neighbor shot
himself to see the blood
and the body.
The moth struggles in vain—he doesn’t want to
give up life so easily. Maybe
he thinks of his mate, offspring,
sex.
Hey, I think that part
of life is great, too. In
agony and in defeat
there is always the sex. I
identify with the moth, as his struggles
are less frequent, less
frantic, slowly resigns to his
fate, as the world’s designed,
as we’re all carnivores; prey
upon those less
fortunate, to survive
and thrive
take a deep dive
rejoice in being alive
the thrill
of watching the kill
and the blood spill
surpass the weaker
though he be a wisdom-seeker—
Earth will not be meeker.
Assuage the conscience with
Social Darwinism,
as the moth shrivels
up, and the spider wraps him
up, and saves him for dessert—the
tastiest part of the
meal.
"What the anvil, what dread grasp
dare it’s deadly terrors clasp?"
And "what design of darkness to appall
if design govern in a thing so…"
big?
But if
there be no design at all, and we
but random gatherings of cosmic
dust that formed life by sheer
chance five billion years ago
and we’ve evolved, through
sex, to
create our own existential
world and our maker
in our own image,
do we imitate
nature, or does nature
imitate us?
Does the food-chain filter up or down?
Unite us all (as the Web unites
and traps us all, the
Whole World Wide)
in cosmic
consciousness, bound up in
universal hunger,
universal sex drive, and
thrill of life.
I return to the window to find
both spider and moth
gone.