Exponential Growth
I.
Fold, crease, unfold, sheets
of paper thin as possibility,
a crisp white plea to gravity.
Forty-five times, a cosmic origami
building bridges from table to the moon.
The mind dreams, unfurls
dimensions from the flatness,
each fold a petition of ascension.
But reality, that quiet artisan,
intervenes. Seven, eight,
perhaps nine folds—
the paper resists,
its fibers tightening,
a rebellion against a lunar destiny.
The geometry of dreams
collapses into the physics of limitation,
a negotiation between ambition and restraint.
II.
Sated with the hunger of excess,
we feast at counters where gluttony
is a ritual, a rhapsody of indulgence.
Plates piled high, offerings to the insatiable
gods of appetite, mouths moving
in a tempo of ingestion.
Like a paper's rebellion against too much
folding, the body, too, whispers its limits.
Sometimes in tears, sometimes in laughter,
but always in inevitability, the stomach's
silent protest, a wall that even the voracious
cannot breach. Eruption looms, a volcanic
protest, or else the creeping weight, its own
gravity pulling the body to a corporeal moon.
III.
From paper to body, from the moon
to the food, all are tethered by the finite,
implacable laws governing a universe
of possibility.
Fold and unfold, feast and decline,
the trajectory of excess tempered by
the ever-present specter of consequence.
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