Latrodectus Poem by Luke J. Holt

Hate in the parrot's branch.
Smells like yours or others
Compete for dominance in the den where certain pulses hit the walls instead
Feelings that tread off the end
While others fall into a breast that beats special always for others
Alone in the foxhole of doubt
No one else fears the concussion quite as much
In tone this wharf of brew is sickly yellow and boasting health in the same hip breath
House furniture
Completed couples of two nestle like spoons
Love coughs tubercular
Rattling like greasy paper bags
When i watch that nuance sitting in my own stomach avoiding the glass that sits with me there in knee deep bile
Not happy with this forest's peripheries
Closed off from hope with the mirrors of others with arrows in misleading attitudes
The only solitude is always the slouchiest monument
The monolith who free-stands in pain
Wanting to be two but rather a haltingly stilted ballet of one
Devotion breaks her neck trying to look back
Wearing curtain-like hair to hide from unfiltered truth
To hide the end under a dish and sift the universe for affection's dewy marigold
Growing on a comet so cold its tail is a frostburned sob
The wind runs scared from her own sweetest sound
And scampers on the flanks of dawn to the enclosure where exhalations yellow and die
Captured in a jar is the day's wan ache
Holding my side
Hefting the arrow
Incinerating other people's Valentine's cards
To vomit where you dropped your pencil in some classroom cliche gone cruelly botched
I shake my fist at the abyss and snicker
'Do worse'
for mere mortals have and have all said sorry
Fewer felt sorry
I've never won anything in my life
If all the merchandise i could not afford amounted to crows
their black would wash the sky in momentary night and still with their legions of jagged faces could not devour devotion's raft than ambles woozily over the short crests of the shoreline soon recalcitrant past the shallows, stuck like a dock at the base of a sand barge moist as wedding cake
The exit is at the limit
At heart or at sea
The river lets out here in the accursed new
Where fate is a pied and gaudy troll who boasts an agenda of mischief
Never relax with a cup of something scalding you haven't closed
(Rules of coffee, hot tea and trust)
I don't want to spill a drop on the future
I cannot expunge brown coins from this furniture because we don't have it
We might never have anything again I'm not in charge of joy
I cannot force-feed the truth to those who graze free range on chewy spiderwebs of lies
like misery's pasta
Slurped till dead
And i am the spider who clicks and hisses unseen as the opiate of vacancy fills her
She will be different when she is changed
She will be comparably an android
Everything soft drained
Everything charming raped and festooned with burns
I'll hold a balloon by it's string outside
Listening to her life become her cancer
Counting bruises and presidents
Waiting for a grand piano to be my hat
Looking at my watch and hoping it's heavy