where everyone is made of butter

touch (if you will) my stomach
- prince, when doves cry

I WOKE UP with a spider near my head. the spider was in a web spun where the ceiling meets the wall. i was close to the spider anyway because my bed is so high. my bed is so high because i made it so. i made it so high because of a bed i once saw when i was nineteen and impressionable. it was about two metres high and made from stolen scaffolding.

the spider is so high because the flying insects sleep on the ceiling and this spider catches flying insects. i know the spider catches flying insects because the other day i could hear a fly buzzbuzzing lo! without cease or respite and i looked for it and i found it far above my head. it was snarled in a web and the spider was watching it. the spider was patient and the fly wasn't. the fly was struggling and wearing itself out and the spider knew it and waited.

i know the flying insects sleep on the ceiling because my bed is high. when i'm in it my face is only a few feet from the ceiling. i built the bed over my doorway. i wanted a kind of entrance hall to my bedroom. i made it high enough to walk under but low enough that a friend can sit on me when i lie in it. (sometimes when two friends feel strongly for one another they want to get very very close and sometimes they sit on each other. we call these kinds of friends special friends.) maybe you didn't want to know that detail about my bed construction. too bad! now you do.

when i watched the spider the other day it was far above my head because i was sitting on the floor and it was up where the ceiling meets the wall. when i woke up today the spider had moved to the other side of the room and so it was right near my head.

it's a daddy long-legs. it looks happy and well-fed. it has a large thorax for a daddy long-legs.

there's a story going around about daddy long-legses. the story is that a) they are more poisonous than other spiders but that 2) we don't hafta worry cos their fangs are too wee to penetrate our skin. both a and 2 are untrue.

anyway: i was wondering if i looked like food to the daddy long-legs or it i was too big to think of as edible. like if you landed on a butter planet and it was so big it didn't occur to you it might be food.

re which: someone told me once about a planet where everyone was made of butter.

'you think that's pretty funny,' he said. 'but they think it's funny that you're made of meat.'

love to all
xxx