inkstained

This is one of my absolute favorite poems,

partially because I know exactly what he means.

I once saw a lobster being prepared for dinner. If

you don't know about lobster preparation, they are 

regularly prepared by being boiled alive. They 

quickly turn bright red, scramble around the bottom 

of the pot, claw frantically at the edges, and emit 

a high-pitched whining noise that resembles a scream. 

There are regular debates about whether crustaceans 

feel pain, but no one who watches this particular 

performance could have any doubt.   

"Here at the Super Duper, in a glass tank

Supplied by a rill of cold fresh water

Running down a glass washboard at one end

And siphoned off at the other, and so

Perpetually renewed, a herd of lobster

Is made available to the customer

Who may choose whichever one he wants

To carry home and drop into boiling water

And serve with a sauce of melted butter. 

Meanwhile, the beauty of strangeness marks

These creatures, who move (when they do)

With a slow, vague wavering of claws,

The somnambulist's effortless clambering

As he crawls over the shell of a dream

Resembling himself. Their velvet colors,

Mud red, bruise purple, cadaver green

Speckled with black, their camouflage at home,

Make them conspicuous here in the strong

Day-imitating light, the incommensurable

Philosophers and at the same time victims

Herded together in the marketplace, asleep

Except for certain tentative gestures

Of their antennae, or their imperial claws

Pegged shut with a whittled stick at the wrist. 

We inlanders, buying our needful food,

Pause over these slow, gigantic spiders

That spin not. We pause and are bemused,

And sometimes it happens that a mind sinks down

To the blind abyss in a swirl of sand, goes cold

And archaic in a carapace of horn,

Thinking: There's something underneath the world.

The flame beneath the pot that boils the water."