soul of a spider

Light rain, 54 degrees. I stare at the melancholy gutted walls, the gentle slope awning of a dilapidated chapel, a flowered courtyard littered with shards of ebony. Motherless tiles and ugly green linoleum. A box of pristine thumb-nails and burnt paint canister. A makeshift morgue, aged chrome and dusted stainless-steel shelves, abnormal and abstract instruments, question marks within the faded marble tile, a cruelly cold coal chamber for burning the swollen-elephantine bodies plagued with cloudy influenza and the red masque of bloated death. Black minnow buckets for the putrid fluid, pans of rancid rat poison, the watchful eyes in the cracks, crumbs of French bread, brittle sticks festering like wood hearts infected by frost spiders. The Bubonic wing, the typhoid scripture and gospel of tuberculosis, the dying embers of Russian consumption, the cholera colored wood floors curled from the constant drizzle of early morning rain, a diseased novella on a windowsill.

Sparks on the bruised horizon, a low purple abrasion bludgeoned with crimson arrows and yellow jaundice scaffolds. Cinnamon lost eyes, a child's melted toy in the clay, the sad hallways of a state hospital, psychiatric ward. The exposed frames, a waspish food plate badly bending from weather damage, a tarnished coin in a soft drink slot, the holes in the door and inside marrow, bitter rust and horrible fungus. Icy chemical stalagmites, an artery of rolling carts and inky medicine, an asylum atop a rolling cobalt hill, a sleepy view of the crumbling statue through the fingertips of a broken window. Busted globes of glass, abandoned staircases and vicious debris sick with pine-salt and poison ivy. A drowsy galaxy of waxen webs and silky strewn candy wrappers. The orange fibers of asbestos, the malformed insulation and remnants of a corroded metal patient bed, haunted hospitals howling with tortured ghosts, the little angels in malodorous burlap bags, small piles of blood-cloth in a rotten coffin, the miniature skeletons scattered in casket-puzzles of bone and brine, strangely contorted silhouettes walking and whispering, the hurtful smiles dancing wildly before my rabid eyes, endless hallways and somber shadows, tattered veils of forgotten curtains, the hollowed blackness among the falling diamond dust.