100 Earths
   

100 Earths are
Jupiter and 80 Jupiters are
The Sun and 250 Suns are
Arcturus and 100 Arcturuses are
Antares and 200 Antareses are

	I don't know how many Earths

		-- I don't want to know how many Earths

		-- But I like 

	The feeling
Of being this far outside of myself:
This far crushed beyond measurement, depth,
Mass, dimension -- and then,
If you stay with it --
Pulled through
To the other side of

	Ultradiminishment,
Until you feel dimensionless,
without boundary,
Ridiculous & expansive,

Rabelaised
Just by having contemplated
Your own unspeakable, glorious

Insignificance 

   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

Pause at broccoli powder,
probe its puree,
consider cobia cubes,
then jaw it all in one quick
Cava-fueled forkstroke

Now pizza pebbles –
a little caterpillar
of parmesan, oil & tomato balls
falling away in your mouth
like savory cotton-candy

Now knot foie,
a sesame-studded taffyish tie,
like ribosomes on endoplasmic reticuli

Then Eggs Benedict, abused,
undone, scattered,
yolk gelled to cylinder,
hollandaise battered in cubes,
puddling out from tine-splits
in sudden hot pools

By this time, wine fully settles
in the deep couch of you,
making study & dissection
& finesse of fork
give way to blunt hunger
Which is a little like listening
to Debussy covered
in double time by a
drunk garage band

Later, all you remember
from the last dishes:

Chartreuse jelly,
singing from its dish
with clear coy wild notes;

Cherried cucumber
in glisteny medusa mass
like some gulfshore algae;

And cuttlefish, squash & chamomile in a cup
with smeared orange dollop:

Gorgeously preposterous,
flavors & scents by all rights
banned from blend
conjoining to startle & twist
nose and tongue
to glad calculus of flavor
   
   

Wd-50:
50 Clinton Street
New York, NY 10002
Phone: 212.477.2900
www.wd-50.com
   
**NOTE: Photo above is not mine, it’s from WD-50’s website.

Even on paper
we’ll grind your breastbone to pulp
stamp & seal it with tread

Even on paper
we’ll puddle your brain
puddle your heart
puddle your crayon cloud dreams
your crayon gust dreams
your crayon gale dreams

Even on paper we’ll mill
your seed dreams and
nest dreams
and wet-feathered squawk-chick
puling feedme dreams

Don’t come here even in effigy
Even on paper;

We grind your line
disappear it into soil
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

                  

   

It has become evolutionary at this point to admire and worship our man-made, synthetic versions of nature and ourselves — while also denigrating/ignoring the original reality from which they came.

As animals and plants become extinct, our fascination and even preference for artificial representations of them [stuffed animals, cute photoshopped hallmarky dogs and cats, remarkably life-like fake plants] dominate. It’s easy to see why — we can extract from the originals all that makes them safe and easy and forgo the figurative thorns (fake plants that don’t stink, rot, have imperfect petals, aphids; stuffed animals or robo-animals that aren’t temperamental, biting, are perfectly obedient, have no excretory functions, are docile, and are able to receive passively all our fantasies and projections).

We weren’t content to extend absolute mastery over nature. Now, annoyed with captive nature’s occasional recalcitrance, or just plain annoying Otherness, we scrap it and make it in our own image, like Gods.

The most fascinating aspect of all this is how it turns inward, upon ourselves. Unable to accept the beauty of variation and imperfection, we will turn to human simulacra more and more — there are already on the market incredibly expensive and highly-lifelike female sex-dummies. Genetics, cosmetic surgery, these aren’t innocent practices, over time they embed this idea in the collective unconscious: “we will not tolerate our own variation and that of others. we will airbrush ourselves and others to make everyone safer to everyone else’s eyes and sensibilities. there is something ugly and frightening about people who don’t conform to our safe expectations, and it’s our duty to remedy this”. And the more people internalize this script, the more they seek to externalize it and inflict it on others.

This is all born of fear. It is a kind of self-directed fascism, an inability to tolerate nuance and variation, a hunger for the imposition of strict standards for what is appealing and what is not.