plasticene

plastic has nothing to do with plasticity. even metal and wood have more plasticity, at least in the meaningful sense of what can be done with it, what it can become, what degrees of freedom extend into the future etc. instead, plastic can't be reformed by the consumer. it's an irreversible reaction. it's like the cake you can't unbake. it's only flexible for the capitalist who produces it. 

Material infinity is terrifying for anyone who as much as begins to appreciate its consequences. It's our desire for permanence - our lust for immortality - that, in a turn of irony, creates the very thing our biology can't tolerate. When i look at these "wonders" of science, i don't see god. i see folly, i see pride. Pyramids and circles; of stone, of stone. Keep it reversible. Keep it weak. Build your empire out of twigs and never say forever. Always look back over your shoulder.

We want plastic
to become plastic
you, me, we, got it
alien alloy
foreign grub to the billion year old fundament
of brown digestion
that global colon
of coprophagic friends
the eat-shit-and-die detritivores
and the microscopic mouths
of fungi and bacteria:
decomposers
they orchestrate the compost!
break it all apart!
tear the system up!
bottom feeding source of circular momentum

We the top feeders
we the litterers
trying to improve upon the ages of stone and bronze
our blunders, permanent
birthing cumulative cesspools
of eternal error
immortal nanoparticles
the crystal flakes of the snow queen's plastic mirror
clogging our vasculature
inadvertent plastic statues
sinking like Atlantis

Metal Detector

just to put it out there, tracing your family history on an ancestry website is, more often than not, a confused ego project. we are all related, literally. the distinctions between so-called families are arbitrary categorisations made for political, social and patriarchal reasons, perpetuated by habit and tradition. in fact, you are, in the most literal sense, related to every living thing on earth: apes, fish, insects, bananas, trees, mushrooms, bacteria etc. your great great great x 10⁵ grandmother/father, a direct line of parentage, was an ape at a time when humans didn't exist. if you went back far enough your mom's mom's mom's (etc) would be some form of worm. this is not hyperbole.

the confusion of these website is in artificially selecting one lineage out of many and elevating it to "your" ancestry, when actually it is everyone's ancestry. by the time you're going back 20 generations, you have roughly 2,000,000 direct parental relatives, so that's not including uncles, cousins etc (its actually much lower due to varying degrees of inbreeding, but that's a whole other story. as an illustration the figure of 2 million will do). that's only tracing back roughly 500 years to the Tudors. and from those millions of direct relatives, the ancestry website picks up on a few of them for whom there exists a record, and makes you feel like you're related to royalty or some person of note, which, as pointed out, we inevitably all are. of course the history of the countless poor and faceless peoples you are related to 20 generations back is unrecorded and "blind" to ones view. in any case, what is left to us (in fragments, fossils and public record) is a strange and corrupted lens.

then there's also the issue of these companies storing your genetic soul and selling it on to third parties so that in years to come you can't get life or medical insurance when the NHS has been fully privatised and god knows what else. mostly it's about building up huge databases of information whose value they know has not yet come to fruition, probably by many orders of magnitude. 

Glide over the superficial
And the apparatus might squeal with delight

You never know

Might find more than you bargained for
Skeletons and keys

Might

Open a truth

Might

Make a rich story out of scraps

Looking for booty
Or a filthy crest
On all fours
I see a man
Tugging at roots

At the helical dendrites of subterranean heritage

And hoping for rushing gold

To understand, you must kneel
Before the gods of clay
What do they say?

Mostly mud
In the vein of ore
By the line of blood
Mine, dirty

So mind your step

As skulls are mined

Exploding fragments of history 

Into a colourful tapestry

So proceed with caution and

Think of the children!
The questions, hard
Stone, even
Petrified by the thought
Of facing family's history

Sift through the dirt