“It’s discovered that mushrooms speak around fifty words.
Bites, sun, moisture, dust…
they permeate through me
down vast, interlocking forests
like trains invented by silence.”
—Tim Tim Cheng
You think the ghosts are dead. You think the tracks are rusted and the wheels stopped turning. But down beneath the moss, under the mulch of your bright green present, the system still runs—quiet as root-rot. This isn’t a monster you can shoot. It’s already in you. It is you. And maybe, just maybe… it’s speaking through your mouth.
Tim Tim Cheng’s poem “Mushroom Messages” is a piece that plays with our very perception of what it means to be haunted. It’s a modern Gothic, and what makes it truly eerie is how it wraps colonial trauma, survival, and repressed histories into a slim, seemingly innocent piece of nature. As much as the poem might seem like a snapshot of the organic world, it’s also a psychological thriller—one that stretches the boundaries between the literal and the metaphorical, between what’s seen and what’s hidden. If you look closely, you’ll find it’s full of ghosts.
The poem opens with the revelation that mushrooms “speak around fifty words,” immediately introducing an element of the uncanny. This discovery suggests a hidden world beneath the surface, much like the subterranean realms often depicted in gothic literature. The mushrooms’ ability to communicate hints at an ancient intelligence, one that has been overlooked or suppressed by dominant cultures; the choice of “fifty words” implies a limited but significant vocabulary. This mirrors the gothic trope of buried secrets and the return of repressed histories.
The diction in “Mushroom Messages” is carefully chosen to evoke a sense of decay, resilience, and subtle resistance. Words like “bites,” “sun,” “moisture,” and “dust” are elemental, grounding the poem in the physical world while also suggesting deeper, more sinister undercurrents. The inclusion of “bites” introduces an element of violence or intrusion, alluding to the invasive nature of colonial forces. Bites is a violence, a rupture. It’s not a casual nibble—it’s the gnawing of something that wants to consume, that wants to take. “Dust” evokes images of desolation and the remnants of what once was, hinting at environmental degradation and the erasure of indigenous cultures. Dust is what’s left after everything has been destroyed, after all the effort to erase history and memory. But dust doesn’t disappear. Dust doesn’t go away. It lingers. It settles. These words collectively create a lexicon of decay and resistance, reflecting the poem’s engagement with themes of environmental degradation and the subjugation of indigenous knowledge.
The imagery of “vast, interlocking forests” evokes a sense of an expansive, interconnected system, reminiscent of the mycorrhizal networks that connect trees and plants underground. The forest, like the mushroom, is a place that doesn’t reveal everything. It holds its secrets in the dark. The trees may stand tall, but they, too, are part of something deeper and more insidious. They’re part of a network. This subterranean network can be seen as a metaphor for indigenous knowledge systems that have been marginalised or erased by colonial powers. Think about how the word “vast” carries its weight here. It’s not a small, isolated thing. It’s a territory that spreads, like colonialism, like an invasive species. The mushrooms, just like the forest, are a force that connects, that survives in silence. The interlocking nature of these forests suggests that colonialism’s roots are tangled, too. You can’t take one part of the system and pretend the rest isn’t there. The trauma interlocks, it spreads, it permeates.
This final line is a masterpiece of gothic metaphor. These mushrooms—symbolic mycelial networks—don’t just talk. They move. They travel through the speaker like echoes through a haunted house. Trains are symbols of progress, modernity, colonial expansion. Think of railways cutting through indigenous lands, bringing with them settlers, soldiers, surveyors. But Cheng’s trains are “invented by silence.” It doesn’t need to speak. It doesn’t need to explain itself. Its actions are its words. Its very existence is a form of silence—the absence of any acknowledgment of the damage it causes. Silence here is not emptiness; it is the concealment of empire’s machinery. It’s a Gothic silence, one that disguises but does not dissolve the violence of colonialism. The metaphor of the “train” links to the industrial revolution and colonialism’s expansion of railways—tools of exploitation, of ordering and controlling territory, of erasure of indigenous knowledge and land. And it keeps rolling, rolling across the land, its wheels clattering against the tracks while no one ever hears its true cry. This is inversion. It’s resistance. It suggests that what carries memory and movement isn’t always loud—it’s silent. It grows underground. It waits. These are not the steel locomotives of industrial empire. These are ghost trains. Memory trains. Built from centuries of erased stories, unspoken grief, suppressed resistance. In a Stephen King novel, this is the part where the protagonist realises: the horror was always there, buried just beneath their home, waiting to speak. And now it has chosen them.
In Cheng’s few sparse lines, there’s no Dracula. No possessed doll. But there is dread—a Gothic dread built not on jump scares, but on history. The poem reads like an eco-ghost story, with mushrooms as spectral voices of the colonised land. They whisper from beneath the forest floor, their language almost forgotten, their messages spread through hidden systems—networks forged not by technology, but by survival. The horror is not that the mushrooms speak. It’s that they were speaking all along, and we never listened. It’s the Gothic realisation that the past isn’t buried—it’s growing back.
Words by Cassandra Fong
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