Dead Harvestman

“I am Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper.” Sean said one midwinter morning.

These were the first words that he said after awakening. He said it because awakening was the nearest he ever got to rebirth. In the time between waking and the time when his regular identity was reconfirmed, usually when he logged on to his computer for the first time of the day, he could briefly be, or pretend to be, someone else. Therefore his first utterance was often a self renaming.

He soon forgot his temporary morning identities. There were many, he did not inaugurate one every morning, but he often took one on.

So it was as Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper that Sean went that morning to his bathroom to urinate.

He unleashed his steaming yellow stream, (not literally, you understand, as he seldom tied his foreskin tightly or indeed at all). Once he had done this, he cleaned the pan; then deciding that the lavatory cistern was dusty, he wiped it with a piece of toilet tissue and in doing so, he disturbed a spider that had been sitting it its webs that hung beneath the cistern.

The spider was a harvestman, a species of arachnid unlike others in these parts, but if some sadist had pulled its legs off , it would have resembled Sir Nigel since its body was almost perfectly round. Its legs were long, long, long, and longer.

Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper was surprised to find it here, he admired its toughness. It was as enterprising as any of the human refugees who frequented this part of London, Sir Nigel thought. He guessed that it was born and raised back in the old long green grass jungle of the back garden, uncultivated as an insult to suburbia.

Here, in the summer it had presumably thrived, eating whatever thrips and droots were a harvestman’s customary fayre. As it sought its harvestman’s lunch, it had moved through the middle reaches of the high grass stems balancing and manoeuvring on its extremely thin limbs, no wider than a technical draughtsperson’s pen line.

Actually it could have been a harvestwoman, and bearing in mind the propensity for spousemunching in some spider species, female might be the more likely spidergender to survive.

Sir Nigel thought that it must somehow have flown to reach the underside of the lavatory cistern in his second floor flat in midwinter. Perhaps fierce autumn gales had picked it up as it clung on for an involuntary hanglide beneath a websail of made its own silk. This flight had, Sir Nigel presumed, taken the harvestman to the ventilation fan in the small shitroom window whence some of the acrid odours of his excretions were wafted and diffused into the suburban atmosphere of this part of North London.

The sight of the live spider under the cistern in midwinter aroused almost contradictory emotions of jealousy and admiration.

He was jealous of the spider, because he wished that he could make a web of strong adhesive silk, but he did not have the necessary glands or metabolism. Had he been able to do so, he might have exuded a vast parachute that could have carried him to the Algarve to drink gallons of gin by the sea in warm weather.

Sir Nigel also surmised that, if he had had an inbuilt web-producing facility, he might have been able to avoid shopping trips. He could, theoretically, have hung a vast web from his kitchen window to the forty foot tall poplar tree that grew at the end of his back garden. However that might have meant subsisting on a diet of pigeons, crows, magpies and the occasional passing seagull. Further more extracting such birds from the web would surely end up being as labour intensive as dragging a shopping trolley to a supermarket.

He guessed that the harvestman ate the small black flies which hovered around his lavatory. When his reflexes were sharp, and a flies reflexes were blunt, Sir Nigel sometimes pulverised one of these insects against the boghouse wall with a swift blow of a toilet roll. He now felt guilty about doing this as it deprived the brave harvestman of a meal.

Why did he anthropomorphically attribute the quality of bravery to the spider? He wondered; it had just blown in and survived a bit, like most other living things round here. Rewarding the spider for the bravery that he accorded to it was, in any case, beyond his scope; after all, pinning a medal to its “chest”, would most likely, be fatal to it; and anyway he had no medal.

He enjoyed such stupid rumination, but it was futile, he had something else to do, he had to log on to his computer and check his emails. This involved consciously taking on the “real” identity of Sean which was the name on his birth certificate, driving license, cheque card, library card, Party membership card etc, etc. As soon as Sean thought of himself as Sean, before he even touched the computer’s keyboard, Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper ceased to exist. Sean became Sean and Sir Nigel was erased and totally forgotten.

In future Sean remembered the spider and he knew of his early morning habit of temporarily assuming personas who had silly names, but he could not remember what the names had been. So, as far as Sean was concerned, it could have been that Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper was Leornad Spinggy-Pitshanger.

Two weeks later, when the days were imperceptibly longer but perceptibly colder, the Archmandrite Merlot von Liquitab found the harvestman dead, hanging legs up from the tattered web remains beneath the lavatory cistern.

Merlot felt a grief twinge, as he regarded the tiny shrivelled body. He hoped that out there in the ex-lawn beneath a six-inch snow carpet, more spiderlings or eggs survived, perhaps buried or attached to the underside of a leaf or stem. He had no idea how harvestmen overwintered.

Then in May when the grass grew tall, new harvestmen could foray out again to feast in suburban jungle.

A phone rang and the Archmandrite vanished.

Jet necklace

Why did I deserve to see
All the towns and cities and major roads of Italy
Stretched out miles and miles beneath me
Sparkling like the jewellery of a goddess
Against a black velvet night?

And could a poor wage slave scholar
Have ever crossed the mountains and seas
To add pictures to his albums and memories
Of the sun rising from the sea at Skyros
The gardens of Granada,
the Oracle at Delphi,
or the elephants of Sri Lanka.

It has been done once,
But it shouldn’t be done again
To jet a fat fool in an aeroplane
From here to there and back
If the cost of spending a Christmas in Spain
Is drowning and deserts and dying

So fly on fartbags, full of gas
Or travel by sitting on your arse
On the whizzing worm of a high speed train
So walk if you can
And bike if you like
But never fly on a jet again.

Stinky the dolphin

Stinky the dolphin’s come to play
He washed up on the beach today,
And on the strand, he rots away,
Whiff, Whiff, Whiff, Whiff, Stinky.

Stinky the dolphin’s come to play.
He used to frolic in the waves
But that’s no way for a corpse to behave
So now he decomposes.

He used to click and squeak in the foam,
As all around the seas he’d roam
But above the tideline is his new home
He’s become a seagulls’ restaurant.

His bones are exposed as he turns to slime
He could outswim the tide, but he couldn’t beat time
And as I hold my nose, I wonder when I’m
Gonna be joining stinky.

Fair is worth fighting for

WE are the big eyed puppies

Who frolic in the sunny forest

Where the flowers are Bright and pretty

And we play with soft recycled arsewipe

When the Loggers come with their chainsaws

To slice the sunny forest

We run up to them eager

Wagging our tails and panting

To lick their steel toed boots