Arachnophobia

Amongst the ruins of my life –
the hedonist crouches, arachnid,
in the long shadows.

I do not believe in ghosts
but I believe in you.


20 November 1983

I’m not afraid of spiders. I have no great love for them either but I try to avoid killing them. I used to read The Amazing Spider-Man from time to time but he was never a favourite. For starters I wasn’t a fan of Ditko’s art; he couldn’t hold a candle to Jack Kirby. That, of course, was back in the day. Once Todd McFarlane got his hands on the web-slinger in the eighties it was a different matter. This poem’s not about spiders though. They’re just a metaphor. I’ve just written a dozen poems for F. over a few shorts weeks and most of them not very good (which is why I’m not sharing them) although they serve as reminders for me of what was going on with us. This one is not for F. but it is about her, about us anyway.

Probably one of the last things you’d call me would be a hedonist. I can, and do, enjoy stuff but pleasure is something that tends to go off quickly in my experience. In my new book I describe a father and son as follows:

Both struggled with the concept of joy and what little things did give them guilty pleasure—the adjective is really superfluous as all pleasure was synonymous with guilt—they each felt the need to internalise; it was certainly not for sharing with the world. And so the two of them would settle in front of their respective television sets, watching with the selfsame look of intense concentration on their faces and never so much as crack a smile, shed a tear or pass comment on the proceedings, belching and breaking wind excepted. Pleasure was an aside, something that came along the way and rather surprised each of them when it did catch them unawares.

Both characters are called Jim but neither’s me, not all me; both contain elements of me; both are exaggerations of me, caricatures. There is some truth in the above quote though and I’ve always been a bit envious of those people who could let themselves go and not pay for it in the morning or even ten minutes later.

Spiders also make an appearance in the new book but I’ll leave that excerpt for ‘Arachnophobia II’ (#577).