Goodbye Spider! Poem by Michael Veremans

Every face of light
In the speeding grey night
Shows tear streaked porcelain
Watching the yellow butterflies
Fly with flaming wings
From the burning poppy fields.
Fed on steam and dreams
They exhaled a lonely house
Filled with corpses
And rat poison radiant air
That blows through the halls
And the closed windows rattle
Against empty and torn fishing line webs.

Goodbye Spider!
The TV screens crack
And the antennas bend
Under their own weight,
A short circuit
From the great underground.

They stood in crooked lines
They stood in rows of burnt trees
Grey with sickly spokes
Reaching out of smoke
And spent, empty rattling dreams
Shrieking and sighing in lust and loathing;

Goodbye spider!
And cry and cry and cry!
He walked away down Sand Street
And there was no sand
And it was dead
And the summer burned.