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

All it took was
One grown-up touch
Too close to places she was
Too young to name.

Now all hands move
Like searching spiders on the
Table of her little
Self.

Skin constantly goosebumped.
Eyes focused on the
Potential harmfulness
Within and between all things
That move with
Predatory silence.

She walks as if under
Water, like a weblocked
Fly; afraid to make ripples
And draw

Adult
Arachnid
Attention.

he runs across the floor
eight legged little beastie
one of nature's nightmare tools
a necessary evil, clean-up module
I leave him alone, as much right as I
to this lonely landing in moonlight

Strip of fabric folded
Darkening the day
So that you not see
Desire radiating

*** cherry red
Soft hands clapping
Flushing the cheeks
And then you smile

I want to be your teeth
So that your tongue
Is constantly touching
Feeling and licking

Black cat arched back
Fingers arachnid running
Descending and deliberate
I want to be your teeth

No sooner through the door
than spider-legged anxiety
scurries back haphazard
like a frenemy whose cactus skin hug
begins in September and ends in July

Stink up the beer house with unadorned putrid self-thoughts.
Poppy-eyed and hating others is easy for blue bottled buggers.
A sweet thing for you!
A growing circle of six-legged empty.

Filled to the brim with puffed up space. A white brim with a shiny red exoskeleton.

Oh, what a dreadful sight!

Hair strewn across a face and hooked into the teeth of the blushy lullabied insect screech.
Clear liquid not blood, but blood all the same on an empty stomach with full vein-shot bones.

Not milky bones with calcium-love..

A dead, deficient, cracked, neglected, insufficient skeletal frame, limp.

Yellowed with hate-smoke and old book notes.
Splintered, crazed and buzzed through the gridded bulging eye-window of every single one of those insect like Self-Loathers.

Chosen out of pure sympathy "We should talk more"
.......To the sun, the moon and the stars?


Every star mocks,

Every beam scoffs

and every moon likes to deride on the pain that hides beneath the lies of human bug eyes.

A simply formed pound of vertebrate flesh leaks soft plasma on the scaly moth floor.

Oh how we are dusty and unsure!

Forestry consisting of a Sitka Spruce and of a Japanese Larch was a claim I made from the start.
Over gardens of attention arachnid lurking selfish bugs and even those half winged "friend people".
The bell has rung the scariest of chimes and with every soul wrenching 'ding' a furry fang digs at the blotchy eyed, softly fleshed girl.


Oh such a sweet thing to be surrounded by selfish bugs who spin webs with tear stained tissues!

Kindred transformation
correlates experience
to my canidae companion
life is a pit bull husky mix
loyal roamer fierce friend
running through thorn bushes
in the hushed hilly countryside
unaware of speeding cars
and demonic dog catchers
populating the arachnid cityscape.

I chase a rabbit to said city
keeping my dog head with me
so I can only see in black and white
a transformative color palette
allowing an allowance for my breed
to take the maximum instead of its needs.
A dastardly deal is done in daylight
for spiders to be dogs
and dogs, spiders
splitting spoils
of both species syndicating society
by painfully punishing unfamiliar families.

Four legged frenzy in my feet fortifies me
from eight legged monsters in the street
slinging webs of concrete—
a wanderer's kennel terrifying terrarium
trapping wasps and butterflies
masticating maliciously
reproducing rapidly
trap door spiders create black widows
and envelope stray dogs in white cloaks.

My vigilance guides serpentine movement
strafing from treacherous entanglement
of the tarantula treaty offering silk
cocoons claimed to be for safety
at the price of my mobility.

I must return to the warm
glow that helps me see
even if that means
crawling through the sewers
and eating from the trash
to emerge from the thorn bushes
that tear off my jackal costume
as the sun cleanses my wounds
uncovering cloud counting capability
accumulating cumulus compatriots
and oak marchers waving green flags
showing they can prosper with tranquility
but these flags draw insects that eat contentedly
until there's enough ingesting in sects to draw spiders.

Crazy is the medicine
as is what the body does
Blood let won't be of my own
Problems? Come find
my home, secluded precipice
Hold up your hand
still it of the trembles
willingly consign
worry at the cost of
all you own

Medicine, come fight me!
Split existence, split to wind.
I'm paper, aren't I?
The weaker of the two.
You're ink, aren't you?
You will do.

It trembles on a pedestal of glass and sand
A single beam of light pierces through the emptiness to illuminate its shaking
Its face of silver mirror reflecting light that disappears into the void
Frost coats the edges in the most delicate web, it shimmers with every angle
What odd eyes scan the depths of this isolation
Endlessly black bottomless pupils searching tirelessly
Eyelashes echoing arachnid origins flutter, meet and part
Sharp angled cheeks cut through the stillness with ease
A stillness of the mouth makes a parting of lips rare and foreign

The eyes flutter closed
Arachnid lashes meeting and locking
The lips part
Soft sighing escapes
The lips craddling its birth

horns, hollow-
ly followed by a public service announcement

you do not exist in simultaneous intersectionality

YOU GIVE US CARBON DIOXIDE,
AND THUS,
you are DEEPLY ENTANGLED

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

a web, spun by an anxious,
poison-cursed arachnid
holds us all by the finger-tips,
pressing each of our infinite, six-second *******
together.

gravity ensures that when the silk can no longer bear the weight of the world,
the rose-tinted lenses will shatter-------------
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx­xxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx
****
x

violently,
our brain stems will rot
alone.

Your hands arachnid
Crawling over me-
Bristled and viscous,
Venomous and binding.
You wove patterns
Under my skin.
Beautiful and unnerving,
The silken threads cover me.
Those terrible eyes haunt my dreams,
My chest pierced by fanged teeth.
You left me in your web to wait.
I can't escape what you have made.

Strike a mark on a sun kissed shrine
Cheek bones, dance within the sand's light -
Lambent spore sprig -Rot - beneath the mine
Lay the tourniquet fused, marble eyes.

Center stark stork - wracked to atomic bliss
Forked tongue minotaur, auric troubadour -
Machinations of bellowed amethyst,
Composed the flowered Aum, raising thy *******.

Arachnid's webbing - strung of turquoise beads -
By what are the viscid lines severed clean
That they convolute binaural progeny,
And lure the soul to breathe?

Welcome to my web, baby.
Better get comfortable.
I'll spin you,
Ensnare you in my thread.
Until you are nothing but juice in my core.

-a.r.r.

While the sun pours over the early nightmarket
An old woman sits, chewing
Betel seed adrenaline into
Wilting veins sprawled arachnid
Behind her knees

She, the center of all activity, is merely there
A few children lift cinder blocks
And their fathers solder wire
To help put up the gate
Before a white temple

She spits a thick *** of it into
Her ***, a young woman nearby
Pulls starfruit from a stall
Starfruit, whose name should belong
To the most elegant fruit, what a
Pity it has such a wretched tang

By now, the old woman is bobbing around
Her murky mind, a betel juice
Aquarium she can barely perceive the precision
Of the cremation ceremony next door climaxing with
The scattering of jasmine leaves
To indicate mourning and forgiveness
For untimely suicide and when the
Cameraman approaches our old woman
She spreads a numb smile, revealing her
Black oily teeth
Tarred over in betel juice

blame the crows
perched in rows
of branches
black suit for a foggy mourning,
the mist so thick it holds in the "caw!",
and they all answer the echo,
but they work at breaking branches
down to twigs, to carry away to their
nest, it is the best
investment in their home.

Yet they drop and leave a few and these land
just past the sidewalk
where the edge is lava rock,
catching twigs in the rusty red colour that
is more rust then red in the fog, these hold
down all sorts of rejects, cigarette but and bits
of paper, those twigs from trees, worked by crows
and silken threads with drops of misty dew.

What a fine thread,
for a fine woven web,
there and there and there
my they are every where,
what kind of spider or
arachnid, weaves a home,
a spider web
without a lid or cover,
with twigs, lava rock
all around, surrounded by other junk,
I would get, I could get,
close to have a peek,
but what if a spider
were to bound from
beneath the web, and lava rock brandishing a sharp twig?



©DWE102013

Terror-rium


We had an aquarium

A river, a lake, a sea.

On our desk—the ocean.

Our exotic fish, fished

from the very river, lake, or

sea which we have now.

On our desk—we provide forage,

food, plants, water, and fish.

The aquarium had us.

…

We had an insectarium

An arachnid, an insect, a butter

-fly. On our counter—the air.

Our countertop full of flourishing

flowers, fluttering wings of broken



butterflies, falling from feed, because

they drink—and we pluck their

wings, tape them to tapestries to

stare. Say, how pretty they are.

The insectarium had us

…

We had a terrarium.

A desert, a savannah, a floor of sand.

Our room is lit by a woodland, a

jungle, a place we’ve never been.

African violets decorate our reptiles,

all scales and shells and condensation.

It rains today—the lid which collected

our precipitation. Our pebbled floor,

formed over our marbled kitchen.

The terrarium had us

…

We had an arium,

and we destroyed it

to keep them on our desks,

nuzzled between family portraits and pens,

to remind ourselves of what

We used to have and

what we’ll never have

again, but at least they are

pretty, and no one needs

National Geographic to stare

anymore. We have our countertops.
...

This was read at the University of Kansas on May 10, 2013:

http://shannonathompson.com/2013/05/10/contest-winners-and-poetry-from-my-ku-reading/

It kills my high
when venom is spit
This enclosure,
unlike mine,
comes with a ****** narration

Mine hears birds and owls
wolves and crickets and bats
and sees quite often starlight
smells burning wood
regrettably the occasional crisp arachnid
Commonly scents of Cannabis Sativa, rarely Indica
Incense, and punks
There are sights of resin tables,
half-inflated air mattresses,
and ***** on the fence
Cling of fence gate
Car
Cry of relief or adventure
heat
sleep
aimlessness

Arachnid fingers
picking at my heart
like the peach pit
torn from its soft, sweet home and
swiftly discarded.
Stuck to the side of a garbage bag,
perhaps one day it will take root
in some far off landfill and
grow into a clumsy metaphor
for beauty
amid heaps of ****.

That girl
with the cotton candy colored hair at
the corner of Fourth and Chestnut
struggles
with four garment bags.
Where the **** is she going
with four garment bags?
I see her every day,
sweating,
shifting her burdens
from arm to shoulder,
then back to arm.
Except when I’m running late;
quarter past whenever.

At least tomorrow is Friday
when we can all gag on our toothbrushes.
The privilege of a clean mouth
should come
with some discomfort.

As I walked by the Water front, I make eye contact with a beached Nymph.
She’s suffocating, She can’t sing for mercy.
I remain cautious, for I am as gullible as a fish.
Maybe Evolution will start a new Revolution.
I followed a Gardner through the concrete forest.
Greeting fellow wanderers,
I’m hoping for something unexpected.
I strive to be accepted.
For twenty four hours, to sleep I say, “Good night".
With the time I’m given. What is it that I’m trying to prove?
I carry garbage in my pocket. I spend my money’s worth
on poisons that I’ve grown immune.
The sweet blue dust is transported from the looking glass to my body mass with the help of the All Seeing Eye and Father Washington.
A Black Cat crossed My path, An arachnid bit My eye lid, a flea hoped onto my knee, the needle purchased My plasma, My shoes stole my sole.
I became dizzy searching for Alexie. Imaging a world with only Half A Sky.  Questioning My idea of reality.
With these eyes, I want to comprehend the fine print, in between the lines, as plain as black and white.
TJW 2013

Lily on my crown,
My soul is rooted with sunflowers,
Love springs from my lungs.
Death is a garden.
Affection a coffin.

Hedge around ribs,
Holy light tightened on heart,
Beating carols only heard by dogs
Like a whistle, thistle on my knees cutting heaven real deep.

Tulips lace my tongue
Taste of angels, backwash of Lucifer.
Eyes pupiled amethyst. The healing stone. My world is healing while thorns and samsara hold my ankles to material and the edge of avarice.

World of loom hill parade ecstasy while weather ignites to 24° psychic readings being hosted in palace atrium & column walls where the archaic clock gongs upward to ****** addict ghosts and mental wards in lucid Babylons.

Lovers screaming against bombs, blister billow black clouds and smoke with marijuana haze in flats and compassion for grief cottoned years.
Rumble of music soaked into ratless insulation, long conversations with the insomniac self who hides from monsters inches over his head.

World of daysetting group understandings amidst orange moonlight. Coalmine haired bereaved droop nose man crawls from darkness for another cigarette on the balcony, 4th floor apartment complex in May. Depression hit like **** **** fogging out the brain.
Emptiness is the west.

Travelers who sway on driftwood face The Cascades acknowledging past times, revolving themes and bullet mouthed villains who seek away from starvation from ego lacking.
Their bile is sentences and the rest, anyways.  

Japanese instrumental rolls through closed eyelids in flashing Technicolor, rabbits watch the highways unaware of mortality.

World of bicycle rides on packed ** Chi Minh
City 2016 Winter where twenty-something North Americans go for pho while others go for broke. Palm trees polka dotting college campus in Afternoon, insects whine for the daydreamers. One is writing poetry in a small Vietnamese cafe sipping earl grey inspired by the Oriental clutter and a redheaded girl back home who paces frantically in the attic besides a crooked lamp scrawling flowers to the rotted whitewood panel work

The artist’s craft is a keepsake for eternity, as wells dry out and desert becomes ocean, poems will melt to matter zipping to outer space, satellite ink spots expanding by forever realms.

Pillow foot sole cracks shell casings on forgotten battlefields in later decades, wiping off grit shoeshine boy corpse particle reformation and fairy spit from brow, the last mad prophet sees visions of Christ as arachnid wretch black widow who venomed our bones with rapture,
doom wax peeling away after the damages had been committed.  

Now I check for spiders beneath my sheets.

Banshee howl symphonic sorrows leak in unison with all lanes of commuting traffic. Denial curse for positivity, mindset slate hiding
The weary souls radiance. On the 15x down Johnson! psychedelic chasm quakes through the wheels and my thoughts are spinning sunshine!
Washing machine dynamo recollections of whiskey spilt over carpet dark sand shade while La Vie En Rose resonates from playerless pianos topped with incense sticks in arabesque ashrams, imaginary shelters. We all have one!

Nick Cave is sleeping by back row while we approach final stop in front of bankrupt Chinese corner stores. He’s murmuring Oblivions and the bus keeps on going.

Death is a garden.
Tears are its rainwater and bucket flow.
Nectar pattern reveries honeybee the flowerpots.
Peoples sprout from them bloomed full.

Rosy reaper blasts past the solar system in a comet rocket since she saved the aliens, she hums Vivaldi and huffs a good huff from her cherry cigar.
She tightens her starlight hood and black holes be born.
Torn apart Pluto goes

B    A    N    G

Comet delirious ignores the decimation
And shouts the Lotus Sutra

“ALL GODS WERE TOO PASSIVE”
Reaper hollers back steering by the milky way and beyond on their hallucinogenic trip.

Lily on my crown.
Crown for the kingdom
wherein Reaper resides
and sings with galaxy ukulele to
the great empty.
Great as all can be.

When I awake I become miniature;
ant to antelope, arachnid to man.
Creeping spirals, dotted lines, linear
thoughts. Calm I calculate, construe my plan.

Today is bland, grey skies, brown souls; stroll palm
in hand. I clap your smile,you touch my knee.
Contact of eyes, then lips; quivering arm,
blue eyes eclipse. I grow momentary
wings, sit on the stars as butterfly sings.

Midday passes, afternoon sun, boredom
arises. I leave you be, head growing,
you crowned my ego. Vision clouded;

I am Hercules, sovereign power.
Deluded grandeur, I perch on my tower.

fire me towards a career
or something
(any/or/either/neither)
because i haven’t been
playing music

and i’m starting to seem
the emaciate-pit peach on  a too-tall
tree of plenty
just out of reach

of tantalus,
waist-deep in a river
of cornsilk braids too
rich for eyes, too coarse for tongue or teeth

garden of goddesses
wielding life-flow
geometry
keep the
hounds and
ghost-things
at bay.

undress a smoky corset,
tendrils, or turgid
rapids, swatting
ceases less
twining strands
than flies.

i wish it away,
woven comfort,
a web of fraying
calico and red tape,
bearing the weight
of an arachnid slew.

yet away with it
yields my downfall,
tumbling branch
to branch,
unfeeling, unthinking,
but for my parachute.

i lost a life
to watching
a mirror and
the marker in my hand,
but it could not stop
the leaves from drifting,
nor the water from taking the leaves,
nor those leaves from disintegrating.

simmer down,
shudder breath,
breathe deep
&center

Jumpercable dreams
Defibrillator epiphanies
Wet streets of this city.
Rain way rivers down
Alley and walk.
Fumble for the seventy-five cents,
Slam!
Crack!
Vroosh!
The heights are drowning!
Shared awning storefront,
It's not stopping and it won't ever stop.
The Lee Rd. sidewalk,
Now the new Rio Grande,
Flows to the big parking structure,
Now an Atlantian City,
Relic to a cryptic past,
Arcane acropolis.
Dry overhang is my raft,
Only it,
Too,
Is sinking.

The spider hanging from the wall,
Does not even notice.
Perfectly at peace,
Master Spider has his web,
His dinner,
His enlightenment,
All of which are part of the
Arachnid awning and web zen garden.

Not complaining, it's just all these god forsaken *** semon demons, suckling sucubus
Take my animal, then sell the stock, it's high treason
Contraptions arachnid, stick it to me ****** and shmozy.
Lady, shady, it fades me. But by all means phase me like ******* wild eyed vixens, oops who's slipping missy.

walks on tiptoes; an arachnid of sorts
with ballet legs and great white jaws sinks its
teeth beside the collar of your jacket,
unfastening the buttons to expose
a healthy beat beat beat but the shame creeps
in, carressing a bare torso, looking;
searching for the fat in which to feast.

Today I witnessed a ****** in the cobwebs
The swift and crafty arachnid ensnared suspended cicada
The cicada several times his size spun into his spindles
Soon a drained addition to the cemetery of exoskeletons
It twitched but with an air of hope long gone
He embraced his fate long before forced by spider fang
The stalker surveyed him, perched like vicious acrobat
About to perform his grand finale among the dust and decayed wood
The drawn out death captivated me, stole my attention
Like the gallows in the streets of times past
I watched and felt the transmission of energy and life
The power to spare a creature, but I let the world turn freely
This one lived and died similar to you and I
The universal experience of limited time
Bacteria to insect to man to deity
Some day we are mummified and disintegrate in the attic

You are a believer of dreamers
Within your eyes I see
A beautiful spiderweb sewn out of ugly
With your branches I may bloom
Arachnid bred by attitude
That I spin is what you see
Thou that treasures immortality
Is for whom I choose to bleed

They approached self-corrections with the necromancies of Leiak, they took the seven candelabra or Polyélaios, and the seven chalices or Diskopótira, immediate to the bags of the Fasmatémporos or breadbaskets, the crimes were archaically repositioned in this Mataki tablecloth enchanted by Leiak, the sin was self-correcting in the parallel line of the slip, doubly marked as a sin of omission, and a concessionary violation of the desire to correct oneself in the completely empty desert, holding hands with wax from the Kerós spell candelabrum or wax made by Aristeo's bees, for the pleasure of the avatars of presence in this inaugural banquet, for libations that spilled part of the lipoids of the Gethsemane bees, along with those of Aristeo to clean the ground mixed with parasitic spiders that ****** the milk that fell from their rituals. When night fell from the third dream, the Mataki was wrinkled by thousands of knots of arachnid legs, which mated with the spider's trochanter, bathed in milk and Corinthian wine. The precautions did not wake them up from the third dream, when they had just broken bread and made the libation for the first time with jugs that glowed superimposed on the icons of the Attic vessels, here is the lavish clothing of the entomological world under thousands of spiders overloaded in the Mataki, and this overloaded on the oak inn that supported it, towards the entire Tagmati in conformation of a model of hoplite spiders, which would gradually transform into specialized units, formed by the precautionary of Aristeo's bees when balancing the unevenness of the tables, Attaching them to the beards depicted in the icons of the vessels, where they saw these images of the future and the past with the Tagmati with Byzantine expressions of Constantine V, and with Philip II providing funding for the new military uniform of the hoplites, completely financed by the coffers Greeks, naming him hegemon of Amphibiousness, after Philip entered central Greece winning at bat Alla de Queronea (338 BC) to the Thebans and Athenians allies, here seven thousand of the fallen Athenian and Theban allies, graced the figure of Demosthenes, for new vessels encrypted with iconic images of Philip "Lover of the Steeds" where a spear crosses hearts in the offspring of his horses, and in his heart too, wronged by the page Pausanias de Oréstide as a royal guard.

Gradually the table was made with more guests represented in the numismatics that ran through the hindrance of the cornucopia, and in the majolica that classified the blood represented right there, on free floors to self-correct for the entire ****** campaign executed by Filipo, and his corrupt but unifying mission to dissuade providential enemies, unworthy to sit at the historical table of the Amphibian, remembered in these vessels, on top of the Mataki that absorbed liters and liters per second the blood, which was drained by the description that was made of the hoplite representatives, which for the first time sat next to the close history of a hegemon. The Sibyls arrived commanded by the Delphic Herophilus, they were served wine of conjectured reverse blood of the Mataki, but from the ground preceded the greatest libation on spring propitiation equipment, which made ties of amnesty where everything reigned for self-correction of the brutality of the symposia, where nothing did. take into account what would happen with the stipend of Vernarth, who still watched delightedly as more guests soared from the wind tunnel of the Profitis Ilias that expelled them.
The ashamed gods hid behind the chandeliers that shone with the ****** waxes of Aristeo, and the polis that made the grape harvest of Sponde, drinking the effluvia of Persephone in the meeting of the songs with her mother, pouring out the earthy gynoecium that awaits the ceremonial, before only those who observe and self-correct. Dew-water poured down from Aegean swells with gorges plagued by a voracious and invasive rain of flavonoid metabolites; of the plants that poured down the gorge that Demeter broke into, on flat and monumental glasses so that all those who arrived with dexterous fists, could give rise to the mixed drink of libation with essences of the sleet turned into the blood for the chalices on the table together al Mataki, who was beginning to replenish himself with the pure essence of necromancy, to begin with, the suppressions of evil eyes, on the hoplites that began to horde them and protect them from a certain visual intoxication.