BLUE LIGHT DISTRICT

My garden has a blue light district lit

by a lantern with a foot-high fluoro tube

behind wire netting charged to six thousand volts

that seduces mozzies on their nightly search

for opportunities for swopping body fluids.

They hit the hi-volt wall and crash

like fighter pilots unable to eject.

The zapparatus does its thrilling, grilling stuff  –

enough to cause the nearby TV voices

to pause for a quiet moment to reflect.

The net is cased in plastic –

a green mesh sized to exclude

moths and flying creatures

innocent of lascivious desire.

But for them there are other threats.

Spiders, they of the eight eyes looking

and eight legs each with hairs

as in our inner ears that sense vibrations

through which they hear their dinner cooking,

have built their webs, like sexual health advisers,

at the base of the outer mesh,

under the blue light and the wire net,

slothful and overweight on welfare,

connoisseurs of cooked insect meat

for their nocturnal feast.

A mozzie-meat Σουβλάκι might not come

and spiders then will seize a moth

that seeks only to celebrate the light  –

caught like a youth in a rip at night.

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