An Argument With A Spider

Sitting on the porch, amid my Sunday morning atrophy,

hungover, drinking black coffee,

I noticed a web with the husk of some unfortunate bee, unfortunatley.

And this bee I looked upon with every adverb and adjective for sadly,

saying something to the effect of how such a sight sickens and disturbs me,

in all its abject cruelty.

And this was overheard by the spider,

who must have been the culprit, who looked to me rather sickly

as though he must have suffered a night like I suffered, abhorrently—

a lover lost, who in my drunkenness, abandoned me.  

"What am I supposed to eat?" the spider said to me. 

I had by then brushed the web away with a hand, but it clung to me—sticky—

as though to beg me to reconsider my mind's anti-spider hyperbole. 

I thought his question rhetorical, 

but he waited for an answer tapping his seventh knee, impatiently. 

"Perhaps, something other than a bee," I replied carefully, "to wit: mosquitoes, beetles, a tick or flea."

He hadn't mentioned his destroyed property

which clung to my hand defiantly. 

And that bee, which had been slurped from its own body so wickedly,

fell to the flowerbed below that was a cemetery. 

"You see," the spider said, "I eat that which comes to me, albeit, often mistakenly.

But I don't torture or slaughter, cow or pig, son or daughter. 

There is no manufactured cruelty by me.

The web is rudimentary and understood quite perfectly,

by any and all who may or might 

find it to be the end of their final flight. 

There's no terror in my meal, 

so should you shrink to a size comparable to that of me

and sprout wings so to fly gracefully

into my web, you'll succumb perfectly naturally—

Which is more than I can say for that of thee. That of your anthropy."

In my humility, I argued not a word more with the spider on humanity.

And he spun his web on my porch again, which I left alone, respectfully.