Brigitta Falkner

Before I disappeared
like a mite
finding its way
through the suck of the suction
into the suction tube
of the equipment;
before I fell silent –
and didn’t waste
another word
or rhymed syllable
on the concerns
of the mite,
I sat detached from the masses,
far from the throng
on the carpet’s pile –
and read THE SONGS
OF MALDOROR.
“From my nape,
as from a dungheap,
sprouts an enormous toadstool
with an umbelliferous penduncles.
Seated on a shapeless
chunk of furniture,
I have not moved a limb
for four centuries.”
Still reading the lines,
half dozing, I already dreamed
I would sleep
as my arm went weak
when I tried
to pinch myself in the knee –
the blood drained out
of my tired fingers,
which, milky white
like fly maggots,
pulled on the lurching
tangled threads,
on the sucking things,
the streaks and slipknots
of the hyphal trap twitched,
wafts of spores rose,
tiny springtails nimbly hopped
in droves out of the thicket
of threads towards me,
while fleeing
predatory carnivores
they decapitate spore cases
night after night with their
two-pronged tail fork;
pseudoscorpions catching psocides –
and their predators, the stink bug,
hunted by furry arachnids,
escaped the mycelium,
which cut through the adhesive
spider webs like a creeper,
merged into numb
wafting ameboid streaks
with the remnants of living food,
and tightly clasped my wrist,
chafed it – even worse:
like a barnacle*
it sucked nourishment from it –
and sprouted roots,
the noose pulling
tighter and tighter,
until my finger went numb,
and now I was unable
to stretch my limbs
to shed the spider webs
from the letters
or to grasp –
and was incapable of reducing
the concentration
of the invasive hyphae
that was sprouting
out of the bars
of the printed characters
between wilting fingers –
like serifs – and had been
hindering me
from turning the page
for centuries.



*) Sacculina carcini: […] Like the parasite / ripening injected cells / from a small pile of muck / of a host animal, / its monstrosity / spoke: sprouting roots, / creating itself anew, / it enters / into the host flesh, / evoking admiration / in which abhorrence is mixed. / Nothing is more disturbing / than an animal, that branches off / like a plant.