How do you forgive yourself for the horrible things you did to someone else in the throes of addiction? MATT, MONTREAL, CANADA

Dear Ray and Matt,

As chance would have it I was clearing some papers off my desk yesterday and found these words, which I think I wrote a couple of years ago but sort of forgot about. The lyric is called ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ and is actually pretty good. As a rock ‘n’ roll lyric it is more fit for purpose than ‘Incinerator Man’ (from #43) – which, to be honest, reads more like a conventional poem – so it’s probably easier to arrange these words to music. Ray, you can have it, if you like. If you record and release it, and it becomes a hit and you go on to become a world-famous pop star, well, I’ll be happy. I’ll also be very surprised as the song is about heroin addiction.

The lyric recalls a time, back in the eighties, when I was stranded in what had to be the worst ‘hotel’ in Tijuana (possibly in the world), withdrawing from a particularly nasty heroin habit. There was a girl involved, of course, and she was Mexican and beautiful and had a tattoo of a spider’s web on her elbow. We’d run out of money and I was strung-out and everything was suitably sordid. We were like a couple of ruined characters from some dreadful Bukowski novel, and if you think it sounds sort of romantic – it wasn’t. I mostly remember lying in my underwear on the ‘bed’ in a pool of sweat, watching insects drop from the ceiling and crawl around on my chest and not having the strength of purpose to do anything about it. I don’t usually dredge up old memories and put them in songs – it’s bad form, in my opinion, it feels like a sort of betrayal of the now – so this is why the song probably never saw the light of day. Having said that, it is a solid rock ‘n’ roll lyric and maybe you can do something with it. I don’t want it.

KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN

I awake to a voice calling from the other side of the wall

I am alone and tangled in a web of backward thought

The Mexican girl with the luminous skin

Sponged my face that had fallen on the dosshouse floor

The Mexican girl with the web on her elbow

Had eyes like windows and legs like a door

I lay there three days dying, three days or maybe more

We couldn’t close the windows and we sure couldn’t open the door

I love women, but I always loved drugs more

Even when I was in ‘em, I was halfway out the door to score

I kissed the Spider Woman and she spun me deep inside her silk

Hung me from the door frame, rubbed me in argan oil and milk

How many blue skies were lost there, how many missed opportunities?

How many knocked doors unanswered, how many phones left to ring?

How many days lived in the centre of the web, alone and scared?

How often did I call along the threads, only to find nobody there?

I am alone and tangled in a web of backward thought

I am the voice calling from the other side of the wall

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