Prolific (Poetry Monthly)

Cherry

By Noo

Sun, 07 Feb 2016
  • 2780 reads
5 comments
 

In the deep of the forest

The seed of an idea is growing

Beautiful and perfect

It’s a tiny story waiting to be written

But what lurches out of the woods

Are freakish, twisted trees

Plentiful, granted

But monsters nevertheless

Bloated, gnarled narratives,

Their sick abundance

Smothers the tiny, perfect story

And it fails to flourish

 

Or if that doesn’t work for you,

How about this?

 

In the cellar, the mushrooms

Are growing in shit

One particular mushroom

Is a wonderful, white globe

Glowing in the darkness

But with horror-film logic

I open the door

Without switching the light on,

And it’s the shit I haul out

Not the globe’s wild potential,

The shit spreads (as is its wont)

And the mushroom withers on its stalk

But we keep on writing

Searching for the seed and the mushroom

Scrabbling in the dark

Out the other side of adolescence

Where we learnt

Sex and death meant everything

Because in the end, there’s nothing else

 

Is there?

 

 

 

 

 

Certificate 15
Poem

Comments

Submitted by celticman on

oh shit!

 

Submitted by Philip Sidney on

I like this musing on what it is to write, the search for that glowing thing we try to tease out.  I think we all question what we are doing and what it is we are really trying to get at, but there is often so much of value in the skirting around.  Love your loaded question at the end, there is so much more, as suggested in your poem.

Submitted by VeraClark on

This reminds me of my own mushrooms. God I hate funghi. I like the cellar images, the fat white mushroom glowing its promise, the shit we flounder in and the self-doubt or is it self-confident question at the end? Really effective.

 

Submitted by blackjack-davey on

where are your mushrooms? you promised a fry up at the last get together

 

Submitted by blackjack-davey on

there is so much more. Bubble gum by mark lanegan

I like the image of these things nourished in the dark, by the dark--- fungi especially do not need sunlight(is that right?) takes me back to a mick rock interview about syd barrett living in his mother's cellar in cambridge, mushrooms growing everywhere... just waiting in the dark, waiting for a chord sequence, waiting to connect to the underground, the magic mycelium

sex and death, one gets so tired about thinking about them-- nothing like a stonking good paperback and a nice lamp

' is there?' tiny and waif like in the huge dark