SPORED: Neglect

* * *

This gory pinwheel is what happens when you neglect a spore print, leaving the mushroom to decompose on your careful verses...

Imagining the wrath of Tracy/Brenda/Kerry/Gillian - and because I had a veritable spore print production line happening, what with the bounty of four books' worth of poetry and a lapful of gilled mushrooms - I carefully removed mushrooms from poems before they turned into...well, fungal matter.

Hence the clean spore prints I posted, lo these last few months.

But when it came to spore printing one of my own poems, all bets were off, as I'm bad at sustaining anger at myself. And so the mushroom slowly flattened and dried out on my poor poem.

I think if it had smelled, I would have got to it sooner...but rationalizations of my neglect aside, there I was with a liquified mushroom and an obscured poem.

I left it where it was for a while longer, thinking that really, it couldn't get any worse. Eventually, I removed it from the windowsill and picked at the mushroom crust half-heartedly.

Then it spent some time on the stairs to the second floor, where semi-important papers season before being added to another pile in my office upstairs.

But somewhere along the line, I started to appreciate the beast a little.

So I'm posting it.

The text, though you can barely read it, is from my poem Toddle, which is currently on the bottom of the pile at the CBC Literary Award offices. Okay, the CBC Literary Award cubicle.

But still. Maybe this spore-printed-call will generate a shortlisted-response.

Couldn't hurt, eh?