29 APRIL 1995, Page 40

Murder

In the small frame of the window, murder: the crane-fly, stretched on the rack of a web, and the spider, its lover, its butcher, hugged in a grim embrace.

Hopeless. The crane-fly jerks like some telescopic bambi, flailing at emptiness, with nowhere to hook its feet but the vast indifferent sky that's the back of space.

And you've seen it all before, the big cruelties and the little deaths of insects. The spider. The man appointed by the junta. And in the frame a reflection of your face.

Stuart Henson