The Spider Man

I always take the same way home:

Straight up University Avenue, then right on Byres Road.

And at the top I turn onto Observatory, then down the lane and home.

I don't even think about it anymore,

I just start walking and twenty minutes later I'll find myself there.

But one night I found myself lost -

I looked up and I was on Sydenham Road.

And I'd no idea how I'd got there.

I waited for a while to see if anything was going to happen;

To see if I'd come there for any reason -

But there was nobody about, and everything was quiet.

And I walked home round Kensington Gate,

And I forgot about it.

But since then more and more stuff like that has started happening.

More things I used to do without thinking about them

Have started coming out differently,

And I've started spending hours doing things I've got no interest in -

With no idea why I'm doing them,

But unable to stop.

I catch myself listening to bands I've always hated before,

Listening to their records over and over.

And sometimes when I'm typing,

A whole different bunch of words appear on the page

From the ones I had in my head.

A few nights ago I went into Barrats to buy the newspaper I always buy -

But when I got outside, I realized I'd bought something entirely different.

I was holding a magazine I'd never seen before,

Something about Science and Nature.

I started reading it on the way home, and there was this article in there

About a wasp that lays its eggs in the body of a spider.

The wasp stings the spider, and a short while after the eggs have been laid

The spider starts to weave a new kind of web -

A kind of web it's never woven before -

Without knowing why it's doing it.

But when the spider dies, it turns out that what it's woven

Is a cocoon for the baby wasps.

A place for them to hatch from.

And they grow safely in there, while they feed on the spider's body.

I threw the magazine away, and made sure I took the right streets home.

And I tried to remember if maybe I'd been stung by that kind of wasp.

And I started wondering how you would get rid of something like that...