Daddy Longlegs was sitting on his net and browsing through his past
He wanted to do something which would make him big pretty fast

He looked around and saw a fly buzzing around
Suddenly his brain was shaken by ideas abound

Hi said Daddy longlegs, it’s nice to see you miss fly
Do come to my web and give it a try

I am well aware of my ill reputation
That is why am sending you an open invitation

Bring in media if you still have some doubts
I hope it will douse your fears if you have them as scouts

Hesitant at first the fly still agreed to meet
She never knew a spider can be so generous and sweet

Fly was warned of spider’s ill intentions and of the agendas hidden
But isn’t there a charm in exploring the forbidden!

I will bring in some reporters said the confident fly
That should take care of the spider’s greed and make him shy

In front of a huge crowd fly stepped in on the web
Daddy longlegs grabbed the fly before she could ebb

Crunch munch he ate the fly in front of the crowd so huge
People were shocked but still stood like a stooge

Daddy longlegs was arrested later and sent to a jail
Where he wrote a book on life in prison and law being frail

The book generated lot of interest and became a best seller
It got lot of publicity as it was written by a spider so Heller

Daddy got pardoned as fly knowing all willingly fell in his trap
Hence it was declared a suicide and the case against him was scrapped

I guess dark is alluring as Daddy’s website has become quite a hit
But there are people who throng the site just for the silken threads and their steely grit.

i saw a funny thing just the other day
a crane fly with a turban came flying by my way
he had little bombs fastenend to his wings
with a belt of bullets and grenade and things

like something from a movie
he looked a proper baddie
a british daddy long legs
that had joined jihaddy

On a wall through the dark of the night,
thrills sent down by countless of legs creeping up and down in their dance
Daddy, is that you ? I asked a spider with long legs
Indeed a daddy longlegs spider haunted for prey
It hopped onto me, trying to guide me out, of this nightmare,
In fact a quite gentle grip of this venomless beast, a sweet embrace of this two eyed arachnid
It whispered to me " Umi, keep going, before they find you "
A shadow of the long past, forgotten in the loitering abyss of time
Serene and clear, my friend kept his dance on my head, resting was no option
A ****** devotion of the creeping darkness,
Ah, phantoms ! Spiders, gather in a dark night,
One tarantula crosses my way, with no intention to bite
The shadow I was running from was no where near, but my knights summoned around me, tapping on the ground with their eight legs in their dance
Realisation floods my mind, relentless, numbing all my senses
The black widow of hatred cast on a pure fury, with lilies of murderous intend, was me,
Running from myself was what I did all these years but not anymore
It is best to dance on these fantastic grounds with me,
Because I am the eternity of this realm of fantasy
After all, we have infinite time in our dreams

~ Umi

One time, when I was ten or eleven years old, for a holiday or something my uncle bought me a model set of a scale V-8 engine. He knew I was into cars, but without kids himself, had no idea that this kind of gift was worlds beyond my preteen intellectual abilities. It fell to the wayside that year, useless in comparison to the easy to open, assemble and operate toys my parents bought me instead.

I had completely forgotten about this model until one night in college when I couldn’t sleep because I was too wrapped up in my own existential crises of the time and too nostalgic looking at all the old car posters in my room. I remembered the V-8 engine, and how even at 21 I couldn’t name a single part in a car engine, let alone assemble one, which was sad because I had been driving them five years at that time. So, with some sort of unexplained sense of unfinished accomplishment, I felt a need to finish it. Or really, to start it.

I got out of bed and started to tear apart my closet, piece by piece, coming across old articles of clothing I never wore, a few aging airsoft guns and even a few smaller models I never assembled, but alas, no V-8 engine. With my labors unyielding, I grabbed a flashlight and headed quietly to the attic, hoping that would be lend a more fruitful search. It took me a little digging and a lot of splinter avoiding in my bare feet, but finally I found it. I blew most of the dust off the box, removing more with my hands, and held the box in my hands like a treasure. It was smaller than I remembered, and the age on the box said 12+, which now looking back on it means I should have been easily able to complete it when I got it.

I worked these thoughts out of my mind, instead turning my attention to the plastic wrap around the box which came off with ease. I pried the color-aged box top off to find a colony of loose parts, of all colors, alongside a small screwdriver, which at that moment gave me a sense of Excalibur in it’s placement. I touched the blue handle lightly, almost afraid to accept its reality at first. Then I just stared at the parts for a good five minutes before I remembered there was an instruction manual. I opened it to page one, and I began to build.

I must have worked on that model for five hours, by the light of my flashlight and the streaks of full moonlight that snuck in through the skylight above. Hours of part maneuvering and placing, losing, then replacing small screws and setting them into place with a tool made for hands half the size of mine word my fingers out. By the time I was finished, my fingers were a little sore and my flashlight was running low on batteries which didn’t matter because the sun was beginning to peer it’s eyes over the horizon. I looked at my creation before me, a lot smaller than I thought it would have been when I first received the box, and felt a sense of nostalgic victory. For years, this project taunted me from the dust piles and cobwebs of my attic, and now, too distant from my childhood to remember anything all too vividly, I completed a milestone that was meant for years prior. I thought about how, at age eleven, I would have proudly shown my father to gain his five minutes of fame for the day, and he’d ask me the name of a few parts of the engine as a quiz before asking me to grab him another beer and I’d feel like I was on top of the world. He’d tell me I could be a mechanic someday, or better year, a car designer. I’d smile and walk away accomplished.

That’s what I would have done then. Now, ten years later, I folded the pieces of the box and put them in the trash can, with the plastic wrap on top. I took my finely tuned engine, my product of nostalgic victory, and brought it back to the confines of the attic. I turned my flashlight back on, moving past splinters and upturned nails to the back, farthest corner, where a lonely black shadow kept all light from entering. I took my prized engine, which seemed even small now in my hands, and wiping away some of the cobwebs, placed it into that dark corner, displacing a slumbering daddy longlegs in the process. I placed the small blue screwdriver next to it, then thought better of it and wedged the sharp end into the wood in between two planks, with the crystalline blue handle glowing in the light of my flashlight, sticking straight out like the tool of Excalibur that it truly was to me.

I took one last look at my creation, then turned and left, knowing that, like my childhood, I’d never return to it. I locked the attic door on my way out and checked the floor for loose parts, covering up any traces of my journey back into one of the aspects of my childhood that I forgot to partake in.

handpicked blueberries in yogurt,
tea on the porch, Ellen,
in desperation to plant a raspberry bush.

jogging through a grasshopper field
holding in screams at the small green chirps
shooting up around my ankles.

grimy trails of sweat, the daddy longlegs
crawling out from under my thigh
the dirt at home under my nails.

nickel-bright stars above
the trees, a cool tress rising,
buzzing in the porch light of
bugs going for our jugulars,
still tight and smooth.

so there on the window sill
i sat perpetrating my crime,
one had outside the window denoting the mentally ill
and the other inside the compartment of
a room denoting terrorists,
then i switched hands and opinions...
and then two bright objects of fire appeared
on the skyline... then another two... a perfect rhombus that
traversed the night sky.

i mingled *r.d. laing with the saint benaiah ben yehoiada today...
what a miracle of the slow approach,
i was so desperate for paper i even wrote on a sunday times news review page,
god help me, i feel the need to speak over people in writing.
testament to modern *******: the modern trans-gender phenomenon
is primarily found in st. thomas’ gospel
as entrée of r.d. laing’s **** of paradise artistic spontaneity
away from rigid theory so numerous in the exampled situation
of the lisp acquired on the psychoanalytic couch...
it speaks of turning left to right... up to down... man to woman...
a bit like a sat nav giving directions... you end up in a kingdom
that’s a ditch and the king is adorned not in crimson cardinal
or purple bishop... but pain... this is 1967... no wonder the hippies
died off after people started to dot dot dot post-1967
with the excavatio in translatio to remould western, christian, societies.
that text, says it all! david bowie and alice cooper and marc bolan
with the lipstick and 8 o’clock eye-socket shadows...
but things are picking up / getting serious...
the young ones are on it... post-colonial details i might have you add...
it was bound to happen... vietnam and the daddy longlegs starving man of africa...
built in processor 5.6GB of memory and an iphone...
what?! i’m translating my slavic soul... we fed the mongrels and mongolians
with crusader ***** in the baltic... we disappeared for a few centuries
and came back... blackmailing the airlines for an unsafe crash landing
somewhere in belarus, with the state banquet officiated, of course.
you see.. i’m the silent eager satyr from such paintings by matejko
like hołd pruski and stańczyk... expression beaming with: yes... go on...
spur me on... i’ll gallop to status of stallion with laughter!
all the catholic canonical saints are for people who prefer images
to words.
so there’s laing in 1967 allowed the ancient deciphering of
quasi-egyptian text... and then all hell breaks loose in the now, present...
i’ve got two left hands and two right feet... i think i’ll transverse
in walking like a crab... sidewise... out of here...
you go along with your daily “historical” bullying...
i like my place... outside the post-colonial continuum...
so much so that i even have a theory for the experience:
HE WASN’T THINKING IN HIS MOTHER TONGUE,
THE NATIVITY OF THE SOUL TOOK FORM FROM THE POLLEN
OF THE BODY, MANY IRANIANS AND EGYPTIANS...
HE THOUGHT COLONIAL, HE ACTED COLONIAL...
PREVIOUSLY HE MENTIONED POLAND LENDING AEROPLANES
TO EGYPT... HE ACTED LIKE AN ENGLISHMAN TO A ******...
NOW I SEE HIM LIKE A PENGUIN WITH CHEETAH FUR...
A WORD OF LISP I GATHER...
I WAS THINKING STUPID TRUST... WHILE
A SINGLE WORD OF THE MOTHERTONGUE RESONATED
TO PURSUE CREATIVITY THUS EXPRESSED
UNABLE TO FIND THE 0,0 COORDINATE IN THE
NORTHERN TRANS-EUROPEAN MILITARY COMPLEX.
this is how integration happens in europe: acquire the native tongue
acquire native psychology... don’t acquire the latter
define the former with exactness of body...
conclusion? i did stupid via trust... he did stupid via a blood-thirst
and a michael jackson trick of bleaching the soul
but leaving the body oddly mongrel-like... not so complete
like africans from the caribbean losing the tongue
due to jamaica’s great weather, then moving to england
and starting reggae rap... god knows how those two fitted for a size 12
perfect matching: quick-slow, quick-slow...
slow-quick rat ah rat ah regina duck in dumplings... bewildering
that i didn’t turn grey but turned ginger over the years.
you see this theory? it makes the mongol horse pale in comparison;
dad said: a jew did it! a jew did it! a ******* mid-******* just said: you
(double emphasis, the colon and italics... well i was there,
and this poem is proof that i was there, with her).
then this poem in the background with added photogenic approach...
titled: on ******* who create art.
ahem... napkin for the torero and rare steak to suite:
there they are the geniuses and the mediocre,
sitting in abodes of aspirational peace of the living -
half-dead many of them almost to the core of rotten apples,
with arsenic in apple seeds the last remaining life -
a poisonous mechanisation of activity on the breeding continuum
curtailed (is that implying cut-short?),
horrible ******* to live with,
they sitting knitting words together that make no cardigan fit,
or they’re making 2d rooms with the odd splash of colour
that will never obey the cube but the rectangular canvas,
no use of a poet’s pen in the solace of a quiet pension spaced,
the usurpers of peace among the living among the twins of sabbath,
these ronin of the fountain of solace found in t.v. and slippers...
who let them in?! can you hear poetry with a hammer?
can you hear it on a construction site, or an art gallery or a library?
so there they are, the *******, choosing the most importune of places
to do their craft... in the living spaces of plumbers and electricians...
hardly the place to craft their art when there’s no pulpit to
exercise their crafty practice with the end remark.
why then the plumber the safeguard and incubator nest of home,
and why the cold chill of aqueduct syringe at home for poet?
does no friendliness reside in stressing or not stressing certain words anymore?
perhaps the coalminers will tell me?
they say i am in a coal-mine by the sheer whiteness of disposable white
of canvas... and only among them in solidarity of a brotherhood
by excavating with them the coal that’s their amber burnt at home
and my solitary ink expressed in the library of their darkness of having
bulged forearm forceps of the bicep and no patience for reading... but digging,
i’ll know my orientation in those mines once more...
where the safe and understood route has has not yet been written...
and all that is seen... is the whitened darkness of the blank canvas of
what i peer into stumbling with the inverse... the flashlight of words
against the darkness of the canvas... me and my blind horse.
god i hate live editing... but then again... it keeps me
drunk and soberly paranoid to scrabble in revisions before i doze till morn.

there's always that trailing off i get when i write,
oh god, whiskey is a ******...
    it drags you like a mermaid to the depths,
i start to feel an anchor in my mind
even though my heart is steady-numb...
   and i evidently become slightly dyslexic...
  but hey! what can you do:
     either drink and be miserable,
  or drink and unfold with terrible spelling at
the end of a session... and feel shame the next
day, having seen the outpouring
from the previous night...
      better still... i could recommend tending to
a small vine-patch...
and like me: taking a break from whiskey once
a year and drinking your own produce...
    unless of course you have a local turkish shop
nearby that sells out-dated beer
  at half the price... let me tell you:
that's ****** marvelous... nothing like
out-dated beer... it's right up there with the rollercoaster
and the kick! my my! it's so sudden...
      but it hits the spot,
all the disorientative effects of mushrooms:
without excess Dali lodged in your eyes...
so yeah, out-dated beer... double the trip...
but today is different, i have about 30 litres of
home-made wine just ready to be drunk,
   i've downed one bottle and i'm running
errands with the next... but i'm not miserable
in that i'm washing away my sorrows...
the funny thing about making your own wine
is that once you drink it: you celebrate...
you start to think about all the effort you put
into making it... how you picked the grapes from
the vine, how you squashed the grapes,
how you stood bedazzled by melting sugar
        in a little bit of water over the stove
(and how it started looking very much like
heavy water, or mercury, but see-through) -
and how you sniffed the stench of yeast,
and then waited for a month or so for the ****** thing
to take up strength...
   and now you're drinking it...
                    oh yes... wine in essex is very much
agreeable... and my my: i am really celebrating this
endeavour... it's not as fake as going to the shop
and buying a bottle of wine... i am drinking
my own work... i am celebrating, there's no god
or omen in the world that can tell me otherwise...
    i waited a year for this, well: two...
i don't know what happened last year, i mistimed...
the grapes froze, there was a sudden surge of frost
and i was really upset because of it, 2 years ago
i was drunk like a skunk for several days
and wrote some poems in between,
      and put my own wine on the christmas table,
but since i was ****** for so long, i could only
showcase one bottle...
      well they do say there are spirits out there,
and i must say: wine, esp. your own really is
the veritas, as the saying goes: in vino veritas...
    bring it back to whiskey, or Ms. Amber as i like
to call her... she's not sour, and she's pulverising,
so she's no friend of the tongue... in case you're wondering
i'd like to call herr goebbels right now...
         but can you feel a shame of having misspelled a word
drunk, because your hands started to feel
   a bit like a daddy longlegs with one or two legs missing?
in terms of the keyboard...
what are the prime digits?
right hand: ******* - ****! now my hands feel conscious
of me talking about them...
middle and thumb (for the spacebar) -
   index finger for the opening bracket (  
pinky finger for the enter button -
                 to make room for the next line -
which makes me wonder about my left hand,
it would appear that i'm left handed when before
the keyboard -
   the main provocators are the index
middle and... surprise surprise! the ring finger!
the left hand thumb sometimes does
                       use the space bar also...
the the right hand ring finger is hardly used...
i remember watching my doctor type at a keyboard once...
a bit like a crow pecking... it went like this:
index (right) index (left)
    index (right) index (left)
               index (right) index (left) - it was agony...
it was a bit like standing at a supermarket cashier with
an old lady in front of you, buying butter and milk
and talking for an hour while counting her change...
   ageism? no! just your typical life-bound comedy of
how the stats stack... we spend this many years in traffic...
and my, the hand thing...
       yep, next thing you'll - aha! there is the ring-finger
utility in the right hand after all - it comes with words
that come shortened, i.e. you'll... the ' mark,
and also the backspace button...
                  i was going to say: (the shift button?
pinky owns it) - as the great kabbalists have this fetish
of looking at your hands, it's worthwhile to note down
this geography of the keyboard...
   they'd just point at the indententions of the hand
and spew words out like: girdle of venus...
     malkhut (silent h) -
                 which brings to mind:
   we already know the name is silent,
  since you might be served an indian dish called
dhal... and in fact you would be served such a dish,
but you'd only say you ate daal... or dāl...
then again that's also true with the pedant puritan
who'd note it as: dhāl... which is funny that this isn't
merely coincidental... a language that doesn't
use diacritical marks, and has a third arm sticking out
of it in terms of what letters remain silent (but are
inserted into words nonetheless), and a concentration
of the same rubik's "cube" akin to y and w...
      y and i are so close! you can almost feel them pushing
together, or giving birth to something!
  why?! why?!
                         (insert snigger)... drunk humour:
it gets the better of me sometimes...
   so yes, that thing about kabbalists and the hand thing,
other words could be included, like: keter,
               bina(h),             gevura(h),  
strangely enough Hod...   tiferet (what a beautiful word),
    yesod....     chok(h)ma(h)...   chesed...
netzach! hey! surfing u.s.a., i think i'll bring my banjo
to sniff out whether i'm part of the scene:
dangle dangle plop plop... ah poo...
                   p pi po'h...           and last weekend
we had snow... it scared the bejesus out of people
for a while, but things returned to normal nonetheless...

- interlude -

the tyranny of being conscious...
long recognised by eastern philosophy and the practice
of meditation...
  to be away from me...
        and they do so, splendid,
and then all toward vanity, given you're forced
into dreaming... so even when you're not even
conscious... i.e. unconscious...
   you're being fed a dream...
  and however disroted that you in the dream
is... there's still you...
oddly enough: if i make thinking = dreaming
   i can honestly say: i wish i dreamed more
than i thought... me not a mighty oratory gob
after all...
            evidently doing hallucinogenics
   was to excavate the dream into the waking hour...
and that's how i'll leave this interlude,
   i just imagine andy warhol testifying about fame
at the opera...
   or that's me bound to watching:
   alain de botton... or what does need diacritical
marks: alain dé bóttą...
                        dé bóttą... the art of travel,
                    on the QE2...    
      dé bóttą! oh the marvel, French of all languages
is nasal and glottal! when speaking Polish you
might as well be talking in razors...
                  Greek and lisp, English and Cockney rhyme...
and the lost trill of the R... R hollowed out...
                and once again to modern times:
the imperial march (darth vader's theme) vs.
     beethoven's 9th symphony...
                                                             tra la la -
both as universally acknowledged as the sound of
a ****... and perhaps a pigeon's coo-woo
                                                                                       -

...the interlude actually contains what ignited me to
write... drinking aside, but drinking too...
   in all too a great happiness that somehow i live
a life that asks for narrative minimalism,
               i can say: and in between i did **** all,
i thought profanity was necessary,
            and how i'd wish i'd have written a epic
like don quixote... but then i thought: keep it real,
keep it real... av a laugh...
                           i'll probably taste the sour from the wine
sometime soon, once the narrative becomes a Gobi
and i get worked about the eventual loss of
   a carpe diem quickie...
                           but it's still there, for the moment...
        and having realised that: it's gone.
               and i did say:
    by the personnae principle, in line with not writing out
a Tolstoy, i have to admit that i never know
who i encounter in my exploits...
            and there is a personnae principle at work here,
it's not Shakespeare, that much i know,
   it's the practice of personnae incorporation that
does away with: and Titus said:
                                      veni! vidi! vendredi!
(oi oi, enough of the French static, ya ponce!)
          so that's that, poetry has come to resemble
   modern art... given the personnae principle
we have done away with all the intricacies of
        writing a Shakespearean play...
Titus - lo!
   Anthony - a plum tree!
                          as a person competent with narratives
i ask for all people to leave the building...
   a pit of tongues i might also add...
      populo in singuli!       ah freckles and ash...
it has to be: pertaining to the vulgate...
   nothing better than speaking illiterate latin ol' boy...
  a bit like richard brautigan
writing the pill versus the springhill mine disaster -
there the buds of the concept personnae (without clear
indication that we are dealing with a crowd,
so no memorable quote or character, the narrator
is trying to keep his **** together, pardons for the laziness
and lack of indicative marks that there are actually
more people in the room than could be expected...
me and drunk me make up a thousand crude-essentials
as to what is intended to imply: having a good time) -
    sometimes poetry is just that: a quickened code for
acting, albeit without any character-study,
        or diet, or paparazzi...  and it's so quick... you've
watched a movie like a mosquito lived its life and you're
writing the credits...
       like richard brautigan wrote that poem -
      when you take your pill
           it's like a mine disaster.
       i think of all the people
      lost inside of you.
richard brautigan! richard brautigan!
this is the mine disaster company, over!
         yes, we number 34 souls in total.
       and there's your thesis! it must be hard to
write "poetry" and never, not once: experience
the Styx in your travels, the pit of tongues,
         or the personnae principle...
              always bound to rigid narrative constructs,
alway having an aliby with a 'he said it!'
          it must get horrid sometimes,
   living that life of a puppeteer / narrator -
     never really drunk with pesky humour -
       never once enjoing a wicked thought -
        a meddle on the omnius frivolity of life...
but personally? i find it almost bewildering that
of all the ancient Greek gods... Hades was homeless...
that's before Hades was a noun designating a place,
a realm... i just find it hard
to believe that of all the gods, Hades didn't have a temple...
    the only god from ancient greece that didn't
have a temple... sure, they had a statue of him,
  but there was no temple to see to benediction...
now i really think i've over-stepped it...
                     the wine is imploring me to end this
polyphonic nonsense, and think of a monophonic
sound of a woodpecker... relax... think of the sound
when wood is chopped...
      relax... forget this circus of what could be
described as a theoretical exploration of a schizophrenic
symptom... think of a monty python sketch...
        calm



                                                                                 .

that’s the thing with those trophy wife types,
never really mandible in *** like a jaw ought to be,
too stiff, too anorexic model type:
pooch pooch a handbag full of duck quack pouts of the lips.
i like mandible women, scary scarred women,
the types that will grow into fond babushkas
and cook you a broth.
ah all this crap with daddy longlegs walking into a paparazzi
web of flashes is ruining the red carpet,
i was about to frizz it up into cushion afro softness
that would be quicksand for high heels.
i need blotches i need survival skills that hold the skin together,
every wrinkle, every passing jest of “irrelevance,”
every amulet glow of feeling through the kaleidoscope of depression,
jet-lag i call it, although i rather call it trombone,
with the numbers it was bound to happen, leaving the mammalian
kingdom and entering the insect kingdom, it was bound to happen,
the lost identity tiling the earth, ploughing the eardrum for symphonies,
it was just waiting... just waiting... like a spider waiting
with the flies of the urbanisation of green & green...
can’t change my mind... blotches on skin and bulges of missing protein
on the hips... perfect girth for child rearing...
i don’t like perfect... it’s supposed to have an aesthetic aura of an art
gallery... instead it has an aesthetic aura of hygiene of a hospital;
i arrested all the beauticians while talking to the paediatricians
painting my nails with u.v. liquorice in this hospital of hygienic looks
but unhygienic romping pompoms that swayed man to chlamydia.

a spider
crawled up my leg
a ******* spider,
daddy ******* longlegs

it came up my bare foot
from the tall grass
and I
slapped
and beat at it
until it was dead