the poet lay flat
on his stomach
on the carpet
staining his teeth with
coffee and cigerattes
as he smiled at the
common house spider
in the kitchen corner,
playing half-heartedly with its web.

wrinkle-eyed daytripper poet boy
scribbled into his five star notepad
that instead of a carpet
he lay flat on top of
individual breath fragments of a dragon--
supposedly a metaphor for
mankind's ability to burn itself alive
and keep smiling.

when the world didn't burn,
or smile

the poet sobbed.

when the poet could only
think of four words
that rhymed with sob,

he decided to weep.

meanwhile the spider weaved its way
into the poet's poem
at first,
but over time the spider began to
seem like slanted rhyme--
it had no place in this masterpiece.

the poet crossed out spider,
and turned the spider into a lion.

to this the spider
stopped what he was doing,
and took a few seconds
to catch the poet
in the web of his vengeful mind
and despise him.

spiders are not lions.

they are spiders.

they are not any different,
any more special,
any more extraordinary
than anyone else.

the spider knows, he understands that no
well-arranged assonance or alliteration
would dare turn a common house spider
into something bigger and greater
than what he already is.

little girls are little girls,
war is war,
fear is fear
the world is-
and will almost always be-
the world.

and yet at the same time

poets are,
after all, only poets

and as poets
they will
without a single doubt
spend their last sugar-stained
slant-rhyming breath
believing with all their hearts
that the way their mother sobs
over their fleeting, dry erase board bodies
as the spider catches a mosquito
in its fear-lit web
would make for great imagery,
if only somebody bothered.

in this unyielding false hope
of the world's capability for
being extraordinary
for the split second
it takes the poet to die
the spider will be a lion
the little girl will be a mother
fear will be the gulp in a throat
transformed into courage
and the world will actually be
extraordinary
exactly as it is,
exactly as they see it,
exactly as we can't.