Secret Track from my forthcoming album of dark poetry, "Urbane Hymns".

Words:

I’d like you to turn your attention, please,
To a humble housefly I have named Louise.
A carefree girl, but a few hours old;
She enters the kitchen, foolish and bold.

You swat your hands and reach for the paper;
Louise the housefly couldn’t feel safer;
She twitches her feelers; senses the air;
Flutters her wings; says “I’ll go over there”.

She crosses the kitchen in a single bound,
A feat that should startle, amaze and astound.
Instead we just grumble and go on with our day;
Louise the housefly does nothing but play.

She sits on an apple, to eat and think;
“If I were a human, my heart would sink.
All that working; never a break!
Acting as if the whole world were at stake!”

“And big old legs, but no wings at all!
The silly things can’t even stick to the wall!
I’m glad I’m a fly, for my life is easy.”
And with that she took off, feeling breezy.

She circled the lamp and inspected the table;
Small pickings there; she’d land, were she able.
But lo and behold, the humans again;
Wiping it down to remove a stain.

“Why keep it clean? There seems no point!
When it’s dirty once more it’ll only disappoint!
And now my food’s gone, what shall I eat?
Against these monsters, how shall I compete?”

“You’re vast, clumsy and maybe a little evil;
Why, I’d get on better with a depressed nut-weevil!
Why destroy what you don’t understand?
I may be different but I too have plans!”

“A husband, some kids; a nest in Slough.
And they too would fly, and be free, and how!
But you envy my freedom, my carefree life,
So you try to destroy it with tools of strife”

“Flypaper; flyswats; a rolled up Times.
Fly-spray you say? Genocidal crimes!
I’m smaller than you, not possibly a threat!
But you shriek in fear and reach for the net!”

Louise rolled her eyes and flew up high;
Unaware that soon it was her time to die.
She circled the lamp, intending to perch;
Something caught her wing, and she stopped with a lurch.

She frantically buzzed, but alas she was caught!
“A flypaper trap” she sadly thought.
But here she was wrong, for this was not Man,
But a spider who had caught her in his wicked plan.

She was alone in the web, save the corpse of a friend.
“So this is how I shall meet my end;
Not flattened by a swat, defeated by Man
But eaten by a brother who does not understand.”

As the spider scaled the silken thread,
Louise called out “Brother, before I am dead
Consider the humans; they’ll kill you too!
They hate every one of us; even you!”

The spider smiled widely and said “Not so!
I have permission to be where I go.
The humans allow me, yes it is true,
Provided, of course, I get rid of you!”

In her last precious moments as the Spider fed,
And seconds before she was finally dead,
Louise looked heavenward and gave out a cry;
“Oh why, oh why Lord do they hate the housefly?”

©Alexander Hayden James Smith