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...
