when he received the first note it was written on the face of a billing envelope Theres a black widow in your mailbox

it was from his postman 

he didnt think much of it
the widow had been there a couple of months hanging out as widows hang out
she was HUGE shiny  not inconspicuous  in the insect world as she moved she must have sounded as if she stepped around in wooden Dutch shoes or clodhoppers

certainly il postino remembered last year the widow in his mailbox

he had to bounce her when she broke their agreement

he agreed to let her stay as long as she wanted  as long as she didnt lay eggs

he told her Make no mistake Cross me Youre gone

perhaps she was nudged by Nature

she defied their agreement

God knows she was cute

apparently she thought herself a tad too cute

                                     Break the rules  Opt to breed  Adios
Dont let the door crack you in the ass on your way out

begrudgingly he evicted her

he took her and her eggsack out at the end of a stick

he walked them across the street transplanted them onto an overgrown bush in the shade near his driveway  

he used remnant strands of web he peeled from inside the mailbox to affix the eggsack to the shrubbery

while he tended to that she wandered off stifflegged

it wasnt really her style

likely she was indignant or miffed at her eviction  by the suddenness or an air of rudeness during her abrupt ride

Whaa Am I a chile she may have squealed

he wouldnt know  he didnt speak black widow

then last weekend he received another note on yet another billing envelope Need to clear the black widow or will cease

to deliver mail 6/25 signed (it looked like) @ (evidently he couldnt read postman)

it made him a little irate

on Monday 6/27 he left a handwritten note Afraid of spiders? Shes a good foot away from your fingers(at the back

of the box)

when he retrieved Mondays mail on the piece of paper he left his note was a reply Yes I am! And when I opened it a few times she was at the FRONT!

Yes I am!

frankly he was beholding to black widows

hed always treated them kind provided them wide berth took a Live and Let Live attitude

one day working as a carpenter under a house lying on his back a nest of widows was dislodged and fell on his chest

he could felt their myriad pointed feet running up and down his tshirt onto his throat down inside it across his face into his hair breeze his ears

                    but kept his shit together

from above another carpenter lit him up with a flashlight and offered I cant help you I suggest you lie still a halfhour or better  Ill check back with you

Oh  You feel like youve been bit

Nah  Feel just a bit crawly is all

Well man youre covered in widows  Be chill  Check on you in a halfhour

given that he evicted the black widow last year he felt obliged to also evict this one

a new stick  new digs  an abandoned brush pile overgrown with weeds and grass

he figured she and hers would prosper   

Yes I am!

that made him laugh

at the room at the bottom of the note he squeezed in My apologies  She evidently likes you!

early Saturday evening,  25  6. 16

 1411,  Day-between-Two-Ts,  29  6. 16

The Kinks Wholl Be the Next in Line https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3kNuSUQcdE

it groped him

it felt him up roughly with coarse filthy hands              

it really got under his skin and irritated him like hives

stuck stickly in his craw
                    that creeping pet peeve(and everyone has theirs)

                                                                     

Clever pet peeve:  pet pee-ve . .                                                       

                   NAH it wasnt         it was shit   pet shit!  spoiling in the sun a visceral chain and clot of blackened dog shit on the sidewalk beside the street

somehow some people didnt see it and failed to go around it

they crushed it crackled it underfoot under their shiny leather soles gummed shoes or their ultra-lightweight waffled-bottomed gym shoes

if baked turds were hard enough they crumbled

if they werent they broke and smeared and laid tracks fingering the poor fucks way as they turned and dragging their foot they tried to scrape off the stinking nastiness

the violation wasnt the dogs they did what theyre was born to do

it fell to their miserable owners or dogwalkers who seemed too lazy to care

he learned through his recent debilitation -- his internalised Ill-fuck-you-up storm -- that he was very much now like the first archetypal chimp who finally used a tool to extend its intentions and growing abilities those things that everyone takes for granted until theyre plucked from them and theyre required to employ thoughtful deliberation and make solutions

now he was opening cupboard drawers with levers opening the dryer door popping it with the tongue of a screwdriver wedged against its boxed chassis unable to bend over his knees too stiff he used kitchen tongs to set the cats bowl down so he could eat and also retrieved small cans and bottles from pantry shelves and dressers and chest 

he learned to adapt

you do because you must

or you let dog shit lay on the sidewalk ignore it because no one saw it was your dog that shit

to be irresponsible or inculpable if no one saw is easy

almost funny if you think about it

you got away with something  Hurray!

his pet peeve-shits were like bombs waiting to go off

and utterly useless

utterly useless until suddenly they arent

until this afternoon

by the afternoon more than twelve hours after he was wakened by pain his body loosened up

it helped that the sun was white hot

the oils inside him warmed

his pet peeve-shit laid at his toes

recovered sufficiently he was able to taunt and provoke the pickup truck driver who at first seemed resigned only to unfurl his long blueskin tatted arm and at its end his knobby fist his finger extended his mute Fuck You! countering his screamed Fuck You Whitey which he directed at him because the driver was flying a large Confederate Flag from the trucks bed       

the driver u-turned midblock and came back down the street in the lane nearest him

evidently it didnt satisfy his ego enough to just flip him off  he honked the trucks horn as he came onto the irate pedestrian

what the driver didnt see  was that under the lip of a hedge to his left there was a length of folded waxed cardboard its longedge honed with packing tape and rendered basically into a combined tool a trowel and atlatl which would help accentuate hurtling his pet peeve-shit laying before his feet

in almost a singular movement he swept up the blackened dog turds turned his back to the trucks approach and turned quickly around(fuck the pain)blind slinging the awful offal at the pickup

Splendid! 

Grace!

it spattered its cowl windshield gobs entered through the open passengers window and speckled the distended length and crossboned stripes and stars of Johnny Reb 

in a pigs eye he honored his Familys ancestry heritage bloodline

there was at long last a smell to match the murderous Racism and Contempt of a Civil War lost one hundred and fifty years earlier and if they thought their bitch was legit and distinguished because they finished Second in the War they might consider Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan also finished Second  

  

              

1639,  Friday,  24 6. 16

1052,  Saturday,  25 6. 16