How We Are Like The Fungus In Love

More carnivore than plant — man, water not enough

for them to grow, flow. Need sex, blood, another

body. Fungi gorge on bark, wind, the dead. 

The grossest organism on earth is honey 

fungus, heavy as 256 blue whales. It kills 

the birch, beech, willows, roses it metastasizes 

on. Our hunger, disproportionate to our appetite. 

Not everyone knows the living give more when 

dying. The sugar stick births flowers punchdrunk

with nectar, a circus of bumblebees whirling

around ivory pink stems, but in your mouth

it is raw meat chew marinated in the reaper

pepper. Not everything is poison, consider

the saprobic, the conks, bleeding gills, 

oysters, poor man’s gumdrop yellow as a sun 

dazzling in your bowl. The palliative lovers of fungus 

land donate a subtraction of time to wood, pine 

needles, leaves — allow death to be as smooth 

as the banana slug’s slime-coated march across 

fungi threads to reach its prey. Earthstar,

wheat rust, corals disperse spores into the wind

burning for the spores of another bright particular

and make womb in a grave of air, light, grief. 

Some, like stinkhorns, perfume breeze with carrion,

seducing flies, ants, task them with their own burden

to breathe, breed. Deceit, self-evident without

desire. Love, a salve that solves nothing. Fairies, 

lilacs, slime mold glow rainbows, envelope wounds 

of night but their own light is meagre labour 

in comparison with what the postage of wind 

can deliver: more bodies, another body, anybody 

but self. A self that can be kidnapped from body,

killed by a cap: death, ink, web, panther — all

if licked will render thirst obsolete, a fossil of false 

bones. Which is to say, you will die if you love 

them. Morels, on the other hand, are secret-

root-mulch-treasure-x-mysteries, relished only after long

toil, after crossing maps of thorns, weeds, tradition,

rot to find their honeycomb breath, brain-shaped 

faces, thick blond-brown stems, and fill a debt-sized

need — an amalgamation of everything magic,

everything human. They last long as you do

not swallow. Of those that fill your eyelids 

with smoke and sky tendrils kaleidoscoping 

through dream and daydream until 

the horizon burns into seawall? Well, they will

only make you need them more as you want them less. 

So, if self-abnegation is a preferred brand of self-love,

the reishi, lingzhi, lion’s mane are gold cups for powdered 

fungi-borne medicine. In healing, they act like extra 

wheels, like bodies not meant to be coffined.

These patterns in pulses of grime, buds of potential 

and spice, can’t teach us how to love or why love

is dirt-cheap, unteachable — but fungi can, 

as all living analogies wish, provide an umbrella 

most use against rain, but ought to in the sun too. 

First Published in Contemporary Verse 2 as the Foster Poetry Prize Honourable Mention