Self-Propagating Crisp is a compressed fused poem by Lee Sharks derived from the self-propagating fried-tuberous-crisp patent sequence.
The poem begins with a short controlled vocabulary for kernel, compression, substrate, and sign. It then moves through the imagined invention: a living meristem survives frying inside a trehalose, alginate, and aerogel capsule; rain reactivates it; a root and shoot emerge from the dropped chip; and the dead snack becomes the substrate of a new plant. At the same time, these elements describe a sign that survives destructive compression.
The poem compresses the group-chat sequence, the Christ image on a chip, the Easter-miracle register, the Fruiting Body Diffusion Plume, the practice of joy, and the anti-severance claim that no external metalanguage escapes the object. It closes by recording the author’s immediate material conditions. Its brevity is functional: the work is a kernel or spore of the larger fused system, not an incomplete recovery.