The House at the End of the World (Spring 2022)

What makes a house a living being.
What gives a home life and agency.
Is it the presence of people.
Or the warmth of the fireplace breathing life through the space.
Or is it the absence of people and the energy they bring.
Is it the coldness of the walls and the rot beneath the floors.
Is it the prickling steps and slithering bodies of insects and spiders buried within the walls.
Or is it the sprouting mold and spores of unforgiving fungi that creep along the walls.
What gives the house consciousness.
Its sentience.
Its vitality?

“The House at the End of the World” explores these questions of presence and absence, life and vitality, and investigates the relationship between the house and the fungal growth. Titled after the anthropologist Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, this piece draws inspiration from known and obscure media that also interrogates the concepts of sentience, animism, anger, punishment, and consciousness: Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Kittyhorrorshow’s “Anatomy,” The Book of Leviticus’s leprosy house, the political theories of Jane Bennet, and others.

The essence of consciousness is created through dichotomies and parallels, linking the mycelium network to spiritual possession, commodifying the presence of mushrooms, and molding them to the growing actuality of the house’s awareness. My poetry walks through the point of view of the house itself, with the physical journal mirroring the progress of the fungal takeover, every word encompassing the inner conflicts of the home’s survival and mental strife as it grapples with its own abandonment and neglect. The house is designed to speak to you, through you, and merge your consciousness with its own. Thinking of the home as a body that functions like yours and mine, with flesh and blood, organic matter and anatomy, adds another layer of being to the home that conjures the pathos of the humanity that abandoned it. And formed through the company of grief also exists the physical decay and growing sentience of the house, a full amalgamation of presence within absence and the limitations of agency.

I have entitled this as fungal possession.










































The End of the World (poem)


There's a persistent scuttling of panic that is running through the walls

The eerie quiet is deafening in the presence of

this nothing

And with the empty outside behind the sealed gaps and corners of the boarded windows

This nothing has consumed everything



Swallowed and smothered

Bound and silenced

I've been left here to rot

To lament a prayer that shall never be answered

To grieve the ones that abandoned me

To mourn my own death


A jeremiad of hateful sorrows


And only spite follows

For retribution against the ones that left me this way

That made me this way

That promised me life

That vowed the rawness of vitality

The quintessence of beautiful existence

Their penance

Is the only option


Yet


And yet

All that was sworn was this bad faith

A contract that committed me to this

nothing

A breach of consent that doomed me to a decrepit vacancy

A bleakness so hollow I feel stripped of the agency

That was initially promised to me

Solemn is my misanthropy

Homicidal is my confession

Ravaged is my hunger

Expired is my patience


I will no longer wait for them to return my purpose

No longer shall I wait on this silent, dismal

street corner

The last house on the left

Overgrown and alone

Dilapidated and eroded


No longer shall I scream into oblivion

To a derelict neighborhood

Only for no one to respond

I refuse to be demolished by their absence

And buried by these gloomy ruins I call

My body


To exist and not live

To live and not breathe

To breathe and not ...

And not

To simply not

Nothing


There's not a thing that I can do to relieve myself of this despondency

A grievance dredged with anguish

I hate them

I hate you

I hate you for giving me a purpose with no

purpose


They left me to be riddled by age

And you made me to be immortalized by

time

Cold and endless hours, days, years

Centuries, Millennium

Forever


It's so cold


The security I once sought for warmth and

foundation

Has since frozen into a frigid and dreadful penitentiary

A prison of icy prolonging

With a sentence that will never gift

salvation

The Day of Reckoning

Only damnation

In place of dignity


Bubonic in its subjugation

Tis be my pitiful affliction

A Curse befallen onto me

Book of Leviticus

Something like a spot of leprosy has become visible within me

My condition continues its plaguing


Spilling from my mouth,

the warm tissue of muscle and saliva extinguishes the fireplace

Hot blood pools from my chimney

Scratching at my throat with corrosive bile

Hatred

Staining the brick and exorcising my heavy heart


Leaving nothing but boarded windows and

a shattered spirit

Broken hinges and doors leading to a labyrinth of blinding blackness

A void so deep you'd be lost forever

Peeling flesh from the interior walls

Epidermal wallpaper ripping up lesions of bloody plaster and leaky spores

And subtle breathing of the floorboards


Creaking and shifting from the pressure of hungry maggots

and greedy centipedes,

lonely spiders, and their misguided prey

Pressed beneath this wooden foundation

Begging to be released from the starved basement

A space where water damage and black mold dwell

and bloated bodies of the forgotten are

devoured

Grotesquely mutilated and decomposed

For the decomposers that have infested every inch of

my withering body


What creeps in this demoralization

Under the surface of a punishing delusion

A contagion of white threads

Of conscious fibers moving and breathing

Listening

Seeing

Witnessing

Perpetrating


Laced and alive

With muted voices

Passing hauntings within the web of

mycelium

Hauntings that grow and throb

Hauntings that spread and multiply

That ooze and bleed

That itch and ache


Unrelinquishing at the sight of my blight

The dizzying shrooms choke me with their poisonous cancer

Condemning fungi cruelly disfiguring my already ugly form

Cursed to deteriorate, to mar and ware

Cursed to live

To live within their possession as their effigy


Yet

And yet


Blessed with their company

It's not so lonely with them here

There's an uneasy welcome in their wake

Writhing through the walls

The cracks and tiny drafts left between rusting nails and rotting wood

Burrowing deep into the hallways

Infested profoundly into my hearth

There's an intimate terror accompanied by

an uncanny familiarity

Scarcity

Within the confines of space

They flood every centimeter of grout

Every morsel of tile

Craving every bit of finite body


A sickening gluttony

Satiated only through gnawing at swollen and lacerated walls and floors

A stilling necrosis swelters and weeps

Seeping and sinking

Inhaling and exhaling


It seems like this enclosure

Once deserted and uninhabited

Neglected and unwanted

Has now found a tenant

And you are now the only ghost present

Obsolescent

And no longer omnipresent


Because, as you start walking down your cul-de-sac

Strolling through neighborhood after neighborhood

Leaving the safety of your haven to pass by others'

You shall remember how you left them

Left them to suffocate without you

To perish without you

To despair because of you


You will remember that you disappeared

And you will remember how you ceased to

exist to them

To your lonely abode

The last one on the left


You will remember the

House at the End of the World


...lost and forgotten...



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