Deadly Nightshade (2012)

My father had contracted the esophageal cancer that would lead to his death when I wrote this poem, which was based on his own description of his disease as a fungus. The idea of a mushroom spore gradually taking over its host was too inviting to resist, and coming from Kent, where ancient woodlands are never far from our thoughts, the fungus quickly spread through one connotation after another.

Deadly nightshade

A mushroom lodged in the damp

stump of your throat. It smelt

like the inside of an old shoe

and now your breath smells of brie,

or athlete’s foot. It grew fat

and got greedy; the more you fed it,

the less it left for you. You shrivelled

as your pipeline silted up.

The doctor shone

a light down your throat

and it didn’t come back. He said

you’ve a black hole inside you

eating everything it touches. Your skin,

its event horizon. Think of yourself

as a caterpillar whose metamorphosis

into a mushroom has begun.

You’re a Taurus now but soon

you’ll scuttle away as a crab,

or at least the mushroom will.

You should have bellowed 

at the first sight of red, 

you should have charged

down to A&E sooner than you did,

before you lost out to gravity.

The doctors have washed their hands.

Hospital food is fed to you

through a tube, the sacrificial bull

being fattened up even as its life

drains away; or is blown away

by a mushroom cloud. Nothing

goes to waste, every morsel gets

recycled. This is a green disease.

They’ve treated what’s left

of you to a soothing view

of a bluebell copse. Heady woodland

air blows in through an open window

and freshens your breath

in one way at least. You see more

of your family now than you ever did.

They come for the spectacle.

It is hard to describe becoming

a mushroom. You have lost 

the gift of speech: your disease

has become incommunicable.

The doctors say it’s not contagious,

but that dust blowing in from

the bluebell woods is heavy

with mushroom spores.