When it comes to taste, there is no question. – Epicurus

I once read that,
during the Siege of Paris,
manned balloons were the only way
to communicate supplies to the city.
The first Airlift.

And as I drop the meager meal
upon this polis of worms
I think, too, that it is Paris during the Terror.
Only more so, the Modern State
not merely going through a dark period in its History,
but sustaining a state of
Permanent Siege.
Starved of mind and body,
the worms live in perpetual, systematic
civil degredation.
Elegan turning against Elegan.
Nematode petroleurs, committing
unimaginable atrocities.

My colleagues call the Explorer bourgeois,
too refined to eat the meal provided,
out in the wilderness of the agar,
vainly searching for his scallops in bechamel.
But I know his hunger is different.

For there was a moment when
I saw him turn his olfactory bulb
toward the giant floating orb that is my hand:
a veritable Utopian Raft,
free from encircling political delusion,
drifting in the celestial Mississippi above him.

Dedicated to Andres and all of the Bargmann Lab.