Tag: dark poetry

Triumphant Undergrowth

The legion of the lived

I sensed a chorus underground
Lurched the shoes and smoke, 
would break cathedrals in half
when it sounded up from the rock.
 
In a dirty limestone city of Christ 
The underworldly plains rolled out
bruising skies, and birds the size
of men, who rattled in their clothes
 
The gems between their fingers
glittered like red stars from roofs 
and opening the thick black dirt
grew and grew a quiet coliseum the 
voices marching up 
Short Nameless Reveries

The black broth, the cream fissures

in particle trails like living sprites

foam in swirls to the crust of my goblet

in plumes of white steam, bellowing

and bathing my skin in ink

giving me breath and old ideas

this liquid flushes our bodies of impurities

while we sit in the thick, sticky dark

of twilight June.

We both have work today.

Mystic Arcadias

Species—Micromphale*

*“Delightful small people but smelling strongly of garlic.”
-Suzanne Lucas: In Praise of Toadstools

Shy little boys cling to the waistcoats
of trees with their caps pulled low.
Little boys run, sending up spores and dust,
they stretch their hyphae
into community pantries

sprouting upwards from volvas (not vulvas)
and skidding their fungal feet into the
neighbors’ Earthen carpets, Into worm-filled upholstery,
Into the sighing screen doors wafting food spores
which graze their Laccarian gills, but their

little-boy mycelium never root. Not in concrete,
tile or pavement, but they float and flay their scales
to fan the ground and dance over fertile soil releasing
from their fruiting bodies: Asci first, basidia when
that won’t work, popping Blisters

in the ground with secret names.
Growing bodies twice their stalk-lengths, bursting through
the annulus, little boys curl, purpling, rebirthed
from dirt, crown bulbous heads like saprophytes,
to eat the neighbors’ cats—or, they bend

brittle-stemmed, shimmer darkly and
sleep outside on beds of moss to dream up
spotty mushroom rings who glisten like the star-
white backs of grubs in twilight dew,
barely beneath the earth’s dark gemstone crust.

“It was found only twice in solitary grace, on earth banks under beeches and quite ravishing with the loveliness of grey and white and a dancing form. Two of the painted group were successive stages of one toadstool.”
-Lucas

Mystic Arcadias

A shrouded beast, A tangled dark beneath

I. Wordless encounter with a monster

Thee, ancient nameless beast
Confront me roaring, perfectly diseased
By color speck and stroke,
Panicked ablaze. To send my whole,
rendered-liquid self into gasp; Here am I:
facing with my little face
A span longer than life. Your vandalized
identity, messy like the dark truth, Oh

It rumbles my body’s boiling brine. I’ll only resign to
You, your vacuum-suck on my bones, when
For me air solidifies in my throat
And flecks stick in bright mockery
Like chunks and chunks of bone
Weighing down with hard-tack
And black, my stuttered lung.

My vision my words drown, swallowing
Molasses until death doesn’t come.
And you’re hunched cradling
My tangled organ strands charred to black
In your hands like
A small dead thing, a story lost to
A chasm, a broken wing on the back,
A curse of repetition
A waterwheel churning black.