Mark Allinson - Two Poems
Sleep
Myceleum
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Sleep
Spine-cord eels and slips
bone-hoops, plunges
to mud of marsh.
Joint-popped from mind-
socket, cord takes
joy in ooze-wallow,
sends bubbles up
to boil image-broth
and froth of dream.
Sifting silt of love's
humus, spine-cord whips,
twists a hungry mouth
to suckle in sludge.
Lithe as willow-switch
it flexes, swishes
as fears fang and dart
its dark of blood.
Dawn lightening
draws spine-cord back
to day-home in bone-
loops that clasp and lock.
Mycelium
Afloat in the loaming
dark of the soil,
spooling threads
urge and begin
weave a knot.
Earth stirs, bumps
like a boil beginning,
and hair-like threads
of mycelium tangle
to compact a bun of fungus.
Even drought-hardened clay,
closed as concrete,
ripples to split as slim
fissures inch into night-
revealing underworld cracks.
Then a breaching head,
bald and glistening
in a sweat of birth,
sometimes spotted
in blots of blood,
penetrates the light.
Yesterday I saw
a white-gilled giant
in the forest, shouldering
up earth-split
and shattered rock, curling
lips, grim as steel.
Dreams, said Freud, rise
from the mycelium
of memory: intersecting fibres
threaded through the brain's
composted furrows.
Others take mycelium
as a model
for all creation, the veiled
threads of life
weaving up patterns
of all Being:
mind from the unconscious,
stars from blackness,
eyes from the cave of womb.
Mark Allinson was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia (1947), where he has spent most of his life. Returning to study as an adult, Mark gained a teaching degree and a Ph.D from Monash University, where he taught English literature for some years. Since leaving Monash, Mark has been teaching literature to adults in his own Adult Education business. Mark now lives in Tomakin, South of Sydney, where he writes.
