The Barbaric Yawp

I wrote this poem to explore cycles of faith, decay, and capitalism through the intertwined imagery of fungi and myth, reflecting on how belief systems can entrap as much as they sustain.

Walpurgis night, and rings of fire,
Saints never found the witch’s grot;
Crooked, consumed, circular choir,
Not barren bares, but cravats on corpse.
—
Yet they didn’t dance to the dazzle of a flame,
Nor did their hands form a telary-train;
To birds, it mirrored a blooming lotus,
A human labyrinth, Chakravyuh of onus.
—
The world was a poetic mass,
Where bulbuls’ babbles were war cries;
These faceless, skinless soldiers had no heart,
For they only spiralled swordless, with ties.
—
A thousand such nooses; there was more to await.
Earth replaced blood; a moving Platonic cave,
Spinning, like a child in her floral frock,
These long-abandoned bodies housed a living mould.
—
In the womb of the Earth,
a liberty cap grew;
The mother tree’s roots,
Below, a mushroom’s mirth.
—
Tender, gentle, a midnight glow,
Within the ring of the hapless,
Another ring; they’d found an elfin-home.
Here was one cosmos uncontrolled by flesh.
—
They marked a liminal space,
Seeping in as serpents, in the bones that decay;
A network of webs, the webs of bipeds,
—
Mushrooms sprouted, peaked from the bony bridges;
Their homes all looked, and thought, the same way.
—
Slow, like a frozen stream,
Man moved, morbidly,
With each chirp, another one grew;
Funny to think; to mark death, life blooms.
—
Had it been any other pest,
I’d known the end;
But with these spreads,
There only remained a recurring hell.
—
I could hear them, above,
Their Croesus chants, their latest laments;
Only if they’d hear me through the soil, once,
They wouldn’t mistake the market maze.
—
Nature was as nature is,
Man still eats the rotten fruit;
However thick be the painter’s colour of blame,
A mushroom remains a mushroom.
—
For when flesh fades,
Fungus fills.
—
I stand at the centre of this spinning disc,
Choosing my own corner
In the labyrinth.