What fungus shapes here, what
ever-widening lesion plants
into shapeless nights, hooks onto
a mania that I study endlessly,
light-like; a cat finicking the
recesses of a waking dream?
I read books that follow white
women into expensive strollers,
into makeup, into the dim corners of
artist residencies with baskets
and baskets of organic food. They
complain about history
and men with secretaries, follow
guided meditations on Beyoncé
to sluice the monotony of monied
sadness, to avert the tedium
that everything is system
and leisure is currency.
I cannot see myself (hate to look
for her) in this small room.
Motherless, I encounter Polanski
again, shooting blanks into my head.
I cannot unsee a thing once it’s
rooted in my dream state,
hard to un-garden the origins that
would do away with this fat
darkness I love. What delights I experienced
in that charming night!
I came softly into fungal fuselage
that was full of lust for
influence, lust for money, for money,
for more money, abstract and tongueless.
And a mirror sprouted there to un-fester
my addiction to rot, some
softness in me not gestating ceaseless
fevers, not conceiving
poems filled with time and antiseptics
that expunge I and I
out like wildflowers, like vines
heavied with guilt.
Next to my face, do you recognize
a certain rage provoked
by a poem that will not abide
the shade of logic?
What fungus shapes here, what
ever-widening lesion plants
seeds into daybreak, unpeopled
by the mortal yoke of power?
It takes a severed hand to sustain
the vicissitudes of lack
buried in the crowd of these mad ghosts—
their dead mouths, open and wanting.
Art by Kaya Joan
