Nightsoil
Graveyard shift on the mushroom farm.
Unconsciousness casts its complex charm,
Pulls out memory, spins and coils it
With no daylight logic here to spoil it.
Images rise in the yeasty brain,
Freudian soap operas acting out pain.
Morlock machinery—hormones oil it.
Royal road or cerebral toilet?
The mind’s defiled in this dreadful school
Sticky and stinking from cellular pools.
As I grow older, more and more often
The edges of these visions soften
Gray cells shrinking from carbon’s dreams,
Locked in the plot of DNA’s schemes:
Excrement of the earth-fed soul,
The sweaty work that keeps us whole.
Elizabeth Hurst
If you have any thoughts
about this poem, Elizabeth
Hurst would like to hear them
