What if precarity is the condition of our time?… Might we think of mutualisms as a form of love?
—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Underneath leaf litter, a dark warmth whispers
in a language with no words for buy or sell.
Our language has words for things that don't exist
and it thieves from the earth to make them seem real –
cloud, stream, branch, growth, real interest. From the earth's
vantage, waste and nutrients become each other.
The advantage of wasting time – we become
sedentary, mycelial. Pores, now spores.
Bones, now filaments of love, mycelial.
Sure, these threads are more strange and frayed than we thought,
but all lives are strange and frayed in this wreckage.
Rest, darken – something else, profitless, might stir.
Withdrawal, grief, might stir some neglected thing
asleep underneath the litter of our thoughts.