Three Kingdoms

Animal

1.

Our mother,
molten animal,
shambles across
giant comet-singed ferns
and we follow.

Black milk cries
from flickering sockets
on her skinless body,
streaming down bone-ridge
and bare muscle-tissue.
Deep and pungent;
tasting of berry, spit-honey,
fecund ambrosia.

Our sap-stained mouths
fill with the pulse of new organs.
We caress each other
with unintelligible vibration,

tearing out with claws
the strands of hell-red neon
which held our epochs together,

collapsing together
our swarms of ecstatic flesh
formless as warm wax,
flowing streamlike
into quicksilver reservoirs.

2.

Living tempests! Carve epitaphs
on this ocean skin,
sharpen us crystalline
so we may rend apart
the solid ships
that drift by.

Trace our drifting nerves
with queasy venom and
fill our mouths
with orange spores
of sugar!

Blind our hexagon eyes
with a screaming white light!
Penetrate the folds inside us
as spirals of root flesh
to churn the vitreous fluid, bile, and blood
into vast slow-motion hurricanes!

Plant

1.
It took us a while to see
the electric blue veins
digesting our everyday architecture.

Wreaths, holographic,
held the sun in its thorns
to bleed silver noise into
empty quarries.

Radial stalks of cartilage
grow from the ground,
one thousand soft fingers
curling off to grasp empty air,
lost in the chaos
of molecular motion.

2.
Two trees speak to us,
raising their bark-scales
to braid quilts
of artery and chlorophyll
between us.

Nectaries leaked
burnt sugar
when their phrases held
a warmer tone,
when somber slicked
their flowers with formaldehyde.

These are the last words
in my human tongue.

By stretching fingers
across leaf-vein and root-coil,
we’ve found
a more moving vernacular.

Fungi (Mycelium)

It eats our undead dream-space
with flickers of worm-tongue;
the pores in time’s skin
are now widening.

We awake
tangled in mycelium.
Networks of dried spittle, lung-tube, and spider-cord
helixed tight around our skulls,
squeezing out fountains
of brain tissue into the wet summer air,
fusing into the spine’s raw node.

Our eyes burned out
after watching it tear into
the heavy opaquery draped over
earth’s inner star.

Now we dream awake and outside
our secret worlds
atomized by the screaming gravity
of black galaxies. 

© Luke Manning, 2012

 Root-tip mycelia of the Amanita
Photo from Wikimedia CommonsSource: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/6/178