Endgame Wegovy
Let’s workshop this poem about corporate opportunism as Hollywood's praise for obesity, "one small battle against white supremacy," slams hard into the reality of blown-out knees and blown-out hearts.
See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost
scent of the day: L’Heure Exquise, by Bortnikoff
L’Heure Exquise (2018, Dmitri Bortnikoff)—a champaca-oud fragrance, objectively one of the best Bortnikoff has ever created and likely the best exemplar of his DNA, that bridges the boozy-fruit tobacco of Tabac Doré and Sayat Nova with the fermented-chocolate tobacco of Oud Monarch and Lao Oud and the bubblegum vibe of Oud Loukoum to make a chewy composition with a balsamic class rivaling Ormonde Jayne’s Tolu and yet with a naturalism rivaling the best artisinal houses (from Olympic Orchids all the way to Ensar)
—opens with a fleeting but forceful burst of Christmas-hay Indonesian oud (perfectly captured in Areej’s History of Indonesian Oud) before a flickering radiance of citrus-eucalyptus greenery (Earl-Grey-like bergamot better then Unknown Pleasures, bitter-honey neroli better than Teatro alla Scala, lemon-camphor cardamom better than Tobacco Vanille) alights a bouquet of waxen florals (apricot-cream champaca, honeyed-tea jasmine sambac, musky-green Indian jasmine),
a Juicy-Fruit bouquet—quintessential Bortnikoff, although here the magnolia comes in the form of champaca (a benchmark champaca, up there with Fiona)—dusted with bittersweet cacao and shrouded in the medicinal haze of tolu-balsam-varnished driftwoods (cedar mainly, but also pine and camphorwood) now charred in an earthen pit along with patchouli-dirt roots and resins (clove-and-camphor-reinforced styrax, fungal-mossy myrrh, briny-mineralic ambergris, and a burnt-rubber trio of smoked-honey Vietnamese oud, smoked-clove Indonesian oud, and smoked-leather cypriol)—
the overall result being a gourmand-leaning floriental fragrance that, perfect for its dusk-and-dawn-hour name, perhaps best out of all my Bortnikoffs balances ethereal immortality and carnal decay (less purely otherworldly than the aqueous spectrality of Santa Sangre and yet not as dankly terrestrial as the compost-laden Lao Oud), a balance that (as many have reported) smells up close more like musty-minty tobacco and at a distance like the juicy-fruit gum of Jubilation XXV (and sometimes even the pink bubblegum we get in ELDO’s Archiv 69 or Lush’s Tank Battle) in what makes in my mind almost for a sprayable version of Yaaseen’s Thai Melange (its jasmine-neroli morning-time sibling);
the overall-result being, in other words, resinous-floral animalic that really does bring me to that twilight time on an early spring day when, as the Earth twirls toward night and a paused feeling seems to overtake everything (including squirrels and trees and even cars), the kinetic blue of the sky yawns into lazy pink and the oblique angle of light, highlighting the peaks and sharpening the veins of leaves, conjure cinematic shadows that plump foliage into juicy life from the washout of a higher sun, machine and organism alike (not so much enlightened as perhaps simply too tired to keep clenched any longer) stretching free from the choppy staccato of noon and from the me-me-me (scamming, gathering, manipulating, eating) perhaps to behold in their own way the cotton-candy clouds (a perfect image for this fragrance, even when sliced by city power lines too gold-dusted not to feel like an intentional part of the painting).
Endgame Wegovy —For my perfume pal, Abayomi Siffre Fat praise (“Werk!”), Oscars recruitment jingle for graveyards, is not all gross calamity: just think of big medicine, squirmy as a diabetic denied a toilet, waiting in the wings— the bariatric wings—for the craze to blow out like knees so it could drop its control-Z.
"Endgame Wegovy" is a poem about the politics of pharmaceutical timing. Its subject is not simply obesity, fat positivity, or the GLP-1 drug revolution: it is the cynical patience of capital, the way "big medicine" studies cultural movements not to respond to human need but to calculate when a trend's collapse will most profitably clear the field. In nine lines and three tercets, the poem stages an entire cycle of cultural history — the rise of fat acceptance rhetoric, its internal contradictions, and the pharmaceutical industry's prepared intervention — with a compression so severe that each phrase must bear several simultaneous analytical weights.
The title establishes the poem's temporal argument before the first line begins. In chess, the endgame designates the phase in which most pieces have been cleared and the game enters its decisive resolution. Applied here, Wegovy arrives not as a beginning but as a culmination: the board has been reduced to its essential positions, the cultural middle game has played itself out, and the pharmaceutical move was always coming. "Endgame" also carries a suggestion of finality that the poem deliberately refuses to endorse — the drug may represent the end of something (fat positivity's cultural momentum, the pretense of body-positive medicine), but the poem does not allow Wegovy to be read as a solution. The endgame is an arrival at consequence, not at resolution.
The opening tercet moves with a care that its breezy diction deliberately obscures. "Fat praise ('Werk!')" operates immediately on multiple registers. "Fat" is simultaneously modifier, adjective, and subject: lavish praise, praise of fatness, praise functioning as the cultural production of fatness as category. "Werk!" imports the lexicon of ballroom and drag culture — a term of fierce aesthetic affirmation — and positions it as representative of a broader political vocabulary that celebrated corporeal size as identity, health as irrelevant, and criticism as oppression. The poem does not simply dismiss this vocabulary. What it does is place it in an unstable compound with "Oscars / recruitment jingle for graveyards." The Academy Awards have, in recent years, been a significant site of cultural representation debates; read here, they function as the prestige machinery that ratifies and amplifies whatever the culture has decided to celebrate. To call fat praise an "Oscars recruitment jingle for graveyards" is to say that the celebratory apparatus of mainstream culture has been cheerleading for premature death. That is a severe charge — but crucially, the poem immediately qualifies it. "Is not all gross calamity." The fat-positive project is not wholly catastrophic. The poem's intelligence begins in this refusal to be a simple brief for either side.
"Gross" deserves pause. Its first meaning is obvious: utter, undiluted disaster. But "gross" also means large, excessive, physically unwieldy — the word the poem won't use directly about fat bodies activates itself in the evaluative clause about fat praise. The poem is not subtle about this collision; it is precise. The same adjective that has been weaponized against fat people inheres in the speaker's own unwillingness to call the fat-positive movement an uncomplicated catastrophe. The language has been contaminated by the argument before the argument properly begins.
The second tercet turns from cultural analysis to industry portraiture, and it does so with one of the poem's most physically uncomfortable figures: "big medicine, / squirmy as a diabetic denied / a toilet." The simile is deliberately transgressive in its corporeality. Pharmaceutical capital is rendered as a body in urgent distress — squirming, needing relief, barely contained. The diabetic urgency is not incidental. Semaglutide's origins lie in type 2 diabetes treatment; Ozempic preceded Wegovy as a diabetic medication. The simile thus implicates the drug's own medical history in the image of its manufacturer's impatience. The industry that would eventually market the drug to the world's fat-anxious populations is here depicted as itself suffering the symptoms of a condition it would later profit from treating. This is dark but not arbitrary: it suggests that big medicine's relationship to metabolic disease is less therapeutic than it is economic, less reactive than it is anticipatory.
"Waiting in the wings" carries this theatrical patience into the realm of stage management. The wings are where actors wait, unseen, for their cue. The pharmaceutical industry has not been absent from the cultural drama of fat positivity; it has been offstage, watching for its entrance. The enjambment that follows is the poem's most sophisticated formal gesture: "waiting in the wings — / the bariatric wings —." The dash suspends the theatrical metaphor at maximum tension, then redirects it without releasing it. "Bariatric wings" are institutional — the clinical and surgical divisions of hospitals and obesity medicine practices — but the theatrical meaning survives the pivot. The industry is waiting in both the theatrical and the clinical sense: offstage and already architecturally prepared.
"For the craze / to blow out like knees" completes the waiting. "Blow out" works on three levels simultaneously: extinguishment (a flame going out), structural collapse (a tire blowout, a wall giving way), and the specifically orthopedic failure of joints under stress. Knees blow out under excess weight; they also blow out in athletic competition. The image is body-specific in a way that recalls the poem's subject without requiring explicit anatomical argument. The fat-positive craze is predicted to collapse in the same mode as the bodies it was celebrating — structurally, under accumulated pressure. This is not simple mockery. The poem is naming a real phenomenon: trends built on denial of consequence do not end abstractly. They end in the body.
The final phrase — "so it could drop its control-Z" — is the poem's conceptual punchline and its most contemporary idiom. Control-Z is the universal keyboard shortcut for undo. Big medicine was waiting, in its squirmy institutional discomfort, for the fat-positive cultural moment to exhaust itself so that it could enter and reverse the entire preceding sequence: walk back the acceptance, reintroduce shame as medical motivation, and sell the antidote to what the culture had been insisting was not a problem. "Drop" is chosen carefully over "execute" or "deploy." It suggests both release and casual ease — the industry drops its control-Z the way one might drop a bag one has been holding while waiting for someone slow to finish. The impatience has been strategic. The casualness is the point.
Formally, the poem works by compression and collision. Its three tercets are not symmetrically weighted: the first frames the cultural condition, the second renders pharmaceutical impatience in bodily terms, and the third delivers the mechanical reveal. The poem moves from the social to the visceral to the digital — "Werk!," "squirmy as a diabetic denied / a toilet," "control-Z" — making each register feel equally contemporary and equally implicated. No discourse emerges clean. The language of body positivity is compromised by its graveyard adjacency. Medical compassion is compromised by corporate timing. Digital idiom is deployed against both.
What "Endgame Wegovy" refuses is the comfortable position from which to read the pharmaceutical revolution as rescue. It does not argue that fat people should not take Wegovy, nor that fat praise is simply lethal propaganda. Its argument is structural and temporal: that big medicine did not respond to a crisis; it waited for one, or rather, it waited for the cultural conditions that had suppressed acknowledgment of the crisis to collapse, so that the market it had already prepared could open. The "endgame" is the move that was always coming, by a player that was always at the table.