Few poems make decay sound so well-mannered. marty hiatt's «tesxstxs: 5» opens with worms "growing in the liquid / of yr eyes," then reassures us that they are moving "slowly, not breaking out / of them to eat your dinner just yet." The comedy is in that "just yet," which treats the worms like guests waiting politely at the door. "Dinner" drags something domestic into the horror, and it stays ambiguous whether the worms would eat your meal or whether you are the meal. Either way, the speaker sounds more amused than alarmed.
The poem's one-line stanza carries its sharpest idea: "and they make the sky more becoming." The word works two ways. It can mean flattering, so the worms improve the view, as if the eyes have become strange lenses that make the sky lovelier. It can also mean the act of turning into something, which anticipates the ending. The line is short and sits alone, so the double meaning has room to land. It also suggests, judging by the imagery, that the "you" is lying face-up, looking at the sky.
The second stanza changes tempo. The opening sentence runs across line breaks, with commas that let it crawl, much as the worms do. Now we get four brisk, end-stopped sentences with nearly identical shape: "trees grow out of your face. / insects nest in yr hair. / vines tie your knees. / fungi sprout from yr toes." Each is a plain statement of fact with a nature noun, a verb and a body part. The verbs are worth watching: *grow*, *nest*, *tie*, *sprout*. All are verbs of life and domestic settling, none of death. The list also moves roughly from head to foot, so the body is mapped like a hillside, with canopy, undergrowth, creepers and mushrooms at the bottom. There is no rhyme in the poem, but there are quiet echoes, such as "trees" and "knees," "eyes" and "sky," and "grow" and "toes." They give the plain statements a faint musical glue without making the poem sound neat or sing-song.
The last line is the most unsettling: "and so, with all that, youre almost complete." "And so" sounds like a cheerful summing-up, as though the previous images were items on a checklist. "Complete" turns the usual meaning of death upside down. The body is not being lost here but finished, filled in by trees, insects, vines and fungi. "Almost" keeps the process going, and the missing full stop leaves the sentence hanging, as if completion were still under way.
Spelling and punctuation carry meaning too. The poem is entirely lowercase and moves between "yr" and "your," then drops the apostrophe in "youre." That casual, text-message register makes the speech sound intimate, like something said to a friend rather than a solemn address to the dead. The title seems to fit this too. It looks like a glitched or stuttering version of "texts," and the number suggests one entry in a sequence, though that is an inference from the title alone. Extra letters seem to sprout inside the word the way growth sprouts in the body. Whatever the explanation, the poem looks slightly overgrown on the page.
What makes it worth reading is the way it handles a very old subject. Poems about mortality usually either mourn or warn. Here the speaker does neither. The body becomes a habitat, and the poem treats this as a kind of fullness instead of a loss. The deadpan voice keeps this from turning sentimental, and the images stay physical and unpleasant enough that the comfort feels earned. It also leaves a question open: is "you" a particular person, or the reader? The present-tense "growing" and the direct address suggest the reader may already be part of the picture. Fourteen or so short lines, and the poem still makes you look at your own hands a little differently.