why mollusca?

All metaphors, of course, have their natural lifespan. But let me argue with this for a moment. Because I am tempted to extend the mollusc totem out beyond its expiry date, even to risk annihilating what might have been an initially well-behaved pun. A snail is an obvious mascot for a system that operates out of the old-fashioned mail service to stimulate and accumulate poetry; the trail that snails leave in their wake is surely an apt and silvery simulacrum of the tracks a poetic community leaves over and across and behind itself. But can I justify expanding the snail conceit just a little further? Can I tell you, for instance, that the snail trail is in fact a colloid mucus, meaning that its particles bring about the scattering of light and colour? Can I say that in avoiding having to initiate 'the colloid mucus chain', my further research found that snails are of the class Mollusca. They are nocturnal. They are restless, migratory. Moreover, snails will sense what they want, some elusive snail-opiate and, fixated, travel in a direct route towards it, battling through and over obstacles, even if the quicker and easier path would be to go around. Snails are inexhaustible breeders, inseminating each other with frenzied procreative enthusiasm...

But perhaps the trope is drying up. Perhaps it is enough to say that my wish for the chain is that it deliver some deliciously sticky poetry.

[Image 'familial' by Joel Bombardier].