Revisionist Poetry – “The Catechism of Rot” – Colonizing Decay, v.4

Beneath the black cathedral of the pines,
where moonlight curdles in stagnant pools,
the forest keeps its terrible liturgy.

There, among the roots swollen like drowned fingers,
fungus wakes in pallid colonies,
soft as grave-milk,
quiet as things that feed unseen.

It climbs the trees with monk-like patience,
pressing its white mouths
into wounded bark,
drinking the slow memory of the wood.

Nothing dies cleanly here.

The fallen trunks do not surrender;
they soften, split, and bloom—
their interiors flowering
with velvet molds and bruised amber spores
that breathe faint clouds into the cold air
like the last confessions of the dead.

And deeper still,
beneath the wet communion of moss and rot,
the mycelium stretches its endless scripture
through corpse-soil and stone,
binding root to root
in conspiracies older than prayer.

The forest knows us.

It watches from its thousand lidless growths,
from shelves of fungus
stacked like rotting hymnals
upon the ribs of dying trees.

To walk here
is to feel the earth remembering
that all flesh is temporary.

Even the air decays.

It hangs thick with the perfume
of rainwater, mildew, and opened graves,
while pale mushrooms rise from the dark
like candles lit
for some buried god of consumption.

And still the fungus spreads—
slow, immaculate, eternal—
a kingdom without mercy,
turning ruin into sacrament,
turning death
into its most fertile garden.