Revisionist Poetry – “Mycelium in the Mind” – Growing, v.3

In sleep I am a house gone damp.

Something whitens in the dark
behind my eyes.

At first it is only a haze,
a moth-fine blurring of thought—
then the spores take root.

They move with terrible courtesy,
spreading through the corridors of me,
down into the hinges of my joints
where pain begins to flower.

I can feel them learning my shape,
their patient colonies
writing themselves through muscle and marrow.

No blade, no fire—
only this slow, inward weather.

My belly turns strange with it.
My pulse grows uncertain.
I become a field
for the elegant ruin of growth.

And still it continues,
soft as breath,
certain as rot:

not death at once,
but the long rehearsal of it.