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...