There’s a hairy spider trapped in my guts;
Many-eyed, pointy-legged, sharp-fanged.
It tugs on this or that tendon as it pleases.
Sometimes its legs are sticky and slimy,
Sometimes they’re dry and rough.
This little motherfucker decides where I go.

But from time to time it makes mistakes,
Like when it pulls too hard at my heartstrings
Or my mind, and leaves them all in shreds
So there’s nothing left to hold together,
Nothing to give meaning to anything else,
As I keep spinning around in a circle.

This therapist I talked to for a while
Didn’t believe that this nasty spider
Could possibly yield me pleasure,
But I have never felt as happy
As when I hunted down relentlessly
Whatever this bastard told me to.

As a child, a version of me I resent,
Because I was an annoying little shit
(I wish I could punch him in the face,
Or better yet, drown him in a bathtub),
I was autistically obsessed with dinos.
One of my first memories involves
Me lying in bed after an operation
(My genes fucked me in many ways).
Someone bought me a triceratops toy,
And I thought it was the coolest thing.

I wish I had to deal with ancient reptiles
(Although they were more like birds)
And their primitive, murderous ways,
Than with the unreliable, nasty apes
That kept saying pointless stuff to me
As I hoped for them to leave me be,
While I played alone in a dark corner
Of our anxiety-inducing apartment,
Pretending to know about dinosaurs.

Now I’d like to meet a dinosaur
Who knows what I want better than I do.
A velociraptor who doesn’t look at me like
‘Are you okay?’, but ‘Do you want to play?’,
An einiosaurus who asks me if I’m lonely,
So he can put his arm around me
And say things that make me blush.
All I retain is a shitty imagination
In an old, broken-down body,
And a rotten brain.

Just once, I’d love to see a dinosaur
Get run over and flattened by a car
If only so I could tell random people,
Who would think I had lost my mind.
Nowadays I know better than anyone
How useless all these dinosaurs are,
So I just kill them whenever possible
With my bare hands or available guns
(They keep coming back from the dead).

Back when I was a shitty kid,
I didn’t know what a spider was,
Just that I hated so much
How it crawled inside my skin
And made its nest under my scalp.

I would love to cut open my belly
And pull out my innards
To let those spiders crawl out,
Which may then crawl into my mouth
To chew on my greasy tongue
Until I choked on blood and bile.

I can’t wait to get rid of them.
They’ve turned my guts inside out,
And the only way to make it stop
Is to crush those fucking things
In between my fingers,
Then spit on the remains
Of the bodies of these arachnids
Whose existence makes me sick,
Who fuck with my head
Making me think and feel like shit.

I’m not a fucking spider,
Yet they insist on making me one
By trapping me inside my skin,
Where I’ll rot away from within.
I am still me, and I will always be,
Even if I don’t want to be anymore.

I can hear the spider’s laughter,
Hear it screaming,
As I lie in bed at night
Trying to sleep as my thoughts spin
Around in circles of nothingness.
The spider’s laughter and screams
Keep me awake for hours on end,
My eyes wide-open with fear.

I ache for some kind of release,
But my brain won’t shut off
As the arachnid twists and tumbles,
Spinning its webs across my mind.
There’s no way to escape
This monster in my head.

At least now I can picture it,
The monster that lurks inside me:
It’s a disgusting, hairy spider
That mainly cares about keeping
Its slimy legs wrapped around me
As it nibbles on my brain tissue.

I was born a dinosaur.
I was born a human,
But I want to be a dinosaur again.
Forget the stupid ape,
Let me go back in time
And become a dinosaur.
I’ll take all the risks.
I’ll grow big and strong.
I’ll have sex with any dino.
I’ll eat a thousand babies
If that’s what I must do.

When I was thirteen, and for a whole year,
I was obsessed with this poor, pretty girl
For who I was nothing but an ugly annoyance,
A relentless weirdo with nothing to offer,
Who couldn’t even understand himself
And who was controlled, robot-like,
By the primitive forces in his brain,
Which made him act and react wildly
To a world that seemed totally foreign,
Even though he knew perfectly well
That he didn’t belong in it.

I was very much into mangas,
As well as Crichton’s sci-fi books.
There hasn’t been anyone else like him.
I read his ‘Sphere’ like a hundred times.
I guess it wasn’t that good in retrospect,
But I desperately needed that escape
From my worthless life as a turd teen.

For a few years I drew so many comics
That I thought I would sell some one day,
But the cast was a mix of existing characters
From mangas, animes and video games.
I didn’t dare create my own stuff
In case people thought it was shit.
But I got to live through those guys,
They kept me from offing myself
(I wouldn’t be here if I had a gun).

I also wrote plenty of stuff, of course,
But my mother didn’t believe in privacy;
I had to learn a whole different language
To write down my painful thoughts.
That broken woman even complained
That she couldn’t understand English.

At times I thought writing was a waste,
That I should instead spend my time playing
The only kind of game that mattered:
The one where you get to hurt yourself.

My mother often berated me
About my lack of social skills.
It’s not my fault that I was born
With this nasty monster in me.
They’re the ones who fucked up.
I didn’t need them nor their love,
So I just kept doing what I was best at:
Being a shitty teenager with no friends
Who daydreamed about hanging himself.
I wanted to live in my own bedroom
To spend every day with the shutters down.

I don’t remember a single moment
Of happiness in my whole life.
I always felt like a stranger
In my own skin.

I can’t remember all the video games,
Many of which did count as obsessions,
Because they captured my whole brain
And made it impossible to think
Of anything else except how to win
(I was sick of losing at everything else).

When that bitch cheated and left,
I spent six months of real time
Managing my local football team.
I barely slept, I rarely took showers.
I video gamed my way through pain.
I have always hated football;
My old man had headed too many balls
And lost what remained of his IQ.

After I played a tennis video game,
I became curious about those fit girls.
That was all it took for the spider to tug.
I learned everything there was to learn
About female tennis players,
At least the beautiful, sexy ones,
Particularly those from Eastern Europe,
Because I wanted to fuck them all,
And it’s hard to find good Russian porno.
I’d rather watch an erotic ballet.

For a few years, from morning to night,
I was obsessed with a Californian harpist,
And whatever I lived through in this world,
I wondered what she would have thought.
I even wrote a whole novel about her;
I didn’t have the guts to call it fanfiction.

It took seeing her in person for me to realize
That I’m nothing but a stupid, broken man
Who holds on to the first available ledge,
Because I’m too much of a coward to fall.

I’m a loser who doesn’t know when to quit.
I only have two things to offer:
My self-loathing
And my inability to understand myself.

The harpist taught me a lot, though:
She made me look inside and see the truth.
I wish she hadn’t; I got a load of new data
That I still haven’t been able to use
To make my life better.

The only times I’m grateful to the spider
That commands this decaying frame,
Are when it orders me to lose myself
By living vicariously through fiction.

Once I feel the fire of a story burning,
I forget to eat, I can’t fall asleep.
I can pull off 7,000 words a day.
Only then this world makes sense.

Too bad that I was compelled to write
At times when I had to hold down jobs.
I lost a couple of them because of that,
Because I just couldn’t give a fuck.
In fact, I’d rather be unemployed
Than have to strangle my obsessions.

I can’t wait to cut off these damn legs
That keep hurting me and making me bleed,
Because I need a dose of pure obsession
Every once in a while to remain sane
(I don’t want to be a human anymore).

I was born a dinosaur.
I am a dino, I will die a dino.
Before I was a reptile,
I was a fucking monkey.
I’ll never go back to being a man,
But I could live like one again
If I owned the right tools
To get rid of my goddamn brain.

I have no idea how I managed
To stay alive all these years.

I suppose I’m somewhat obsessed
With the many varieties of VR sex,
But I need the pleasure of coming,
Or else I won’t feel anything at all
Except the cold grip of reality
As I stare up at the ceiling.

I started a novella a few weeks ago
About this writer who became homeless
And then ended up in the future.
Although I’ve tried returning to it,
I just can’t force myself to care.
I was so invested in it at the start,
But my interest disappeared.
The fickle spider tugged me away.
At the most I can hope that I’ll return
And finish it one of these days.

I intended to list a myriad of obsessions
That have kept me going until now,
But for all of these shitty thirty six years
I have relied on the spider’s decisions,
An alien force with its own agenda,
To escape from the meaningless pain.

Only when I’m alone in a silent room
I have been able to relax and feel free,
And forget about whatever bothers me.
Then, I let that spider out of its cage,
Let it crawl up and down my self
Until it has covered me with its sticky web,
Which will then pull me into a deep trance
Where I’ll dream of inhabiting a new body,
One free of my years-old problems,
Without obsessions,
So I won’t have to worry anymore
About being sick, or getting older,
Or growing up,
Or needing someone to take care of me,
Or wanting to die.

I’m well aware how that damn spider
Came to command my broken brain.
I was born with this autism thing,
High-functioning or otherwise.
It took meeting some others in person
For me to understand how annoying
Autistic people get when they go on
About their pathological obsessions,
But I always write whatever I want,
Because I need that to remain myself.

Even if I’m not able to understand
Why the world is such a painful place,
I don’t want to waste my limited time
On things I don’t give a shit about.
So when the spider comes to tell me:
“Stop whining and become more obsessed,”
I obey,
But I still think I should be allowed to whine.

My obsessions are my friends,
They help me to see the world
Without the interference of the bullshit
All the ape bastards crammed into my brain.

I’m sure I’ll die of some terminal disease
(Alzheimer’s and cancer run in my genes).
Otherwise I’ll hang myself or jump off a cliff.
Until then, I will need to write obsessively
About whatever this spider fucker focuses on.
I have never felt like this shitty life mattered
As when I lived through someone else’s skin.

Barely anybody reads my trash,
So if you happened to read this,
I would say “Sorry for annoying you,”
But I’d rather stay silent than lie.
The truth is that I wrote this crap
Because I needed to add meaning
To another pointless workday.

If you ever meet me in real life,
Don’t hit me over the head with a shovel
(I’ve had enough of being a monkey),
And please remember to feed the spider
That inhabits my skull.

You better stop reading my stuff.
I only have worry and misery to share,
And I need that little bit of company
Even if it means a like in my screen.
So stop bothering with this bullshit
And protect your valuable brain
From the endless stream of trash
I send down this shitty old pipe.

‘Spider Commander Versus Dinosaur-Monkey’ by Jon Ureña