Anyone who has left a Popsicle in the sun knows how it ends: a sticky puddle on the pavement. Francis Scudellari's "Puddle of Cryonics" starts from that joke. The speaker is offered a way to cheat death, and he turns it down for the fate of the melted dessert. The comparison is funny, but the poem argues that being frozen and kept is a poorer deal than being allowed to disappear.
The poem is built like a sales pitch that falls apart. It opens with a plain preference, "I'd rather be a puddle / than a Popsicle," then asks "Can I tell you why?", as if he were buttonholing a listener. The next question, "What should / immortality cost?", sets up the infomercial language that follows: "the low- / low price of twenty-nine, / nine-ninety-nine." The line break splits "low-low" in two, so the salesman's singsong gets a pause. The speaker then admits he has "the latter, / not the former." The wordplay on "no cents" seems to hint that he is broke, though the sense is slippery. Immortality is treated as a consumer product, and the poem's tone suggests that is part of what is wrong with it.
The middle stanzas move from salesmanship to butchery. The body is "flushed, / then re-pumped blue for blood," "bagged and hung / upside down." The vocabulary sounds more like a game larder than a hospital: "gamy non-life," "pickled brain," "shell me out." Even the phrase "If plans hatch as laid" blends "best-laid plans" with eggs and chicks, so the revival becomes something poultry-like and faintly absurd. The "sparing / accommodation" is a polite euphemism for a storage tank, and the sentence stretches across the stanza break the way the body hangs. The speaker never argues against cryonics. He lets the images make the process look undignified.
The turn comes with the question "But why would it bother?" The speaker doubts that any future would revive him out of kindness. His guess is that science would want to "pick my pickled brain / about times ago / when men couldn't see much / beyond their vanity." The odd phrase "times ago" makes the past sound vague and distant, and he would be reduced to a specimen, a talking relic of a short-sighted age. There is irony here, because the wish to live forever is itself a kind of vanity. Without saying so outright, the speaker implies that paying to be preserved is the very blindness the future would be curious about.
The sound and rhythm suit this plain-spoken voice. The poem has no regular rhyme or meter. It runs in short, conversational lines grouped in tercets, with sentences that spill over the breaks ("not the former, / at least not in this lifetime"). That keeps the speech casual, like someone thinking aloud. Instead of rhyme there are small bursts of alliteration: "puddle" and "Popsicle," "patch and catch," "pickled brain." They give the lines a playful bounce and keep the grim subject light.
The ending circles back. "And that takes me back / where I started at" is deliberately colloquial, and the poem repeats its first claim: "I'd rather be a puddle, / and evaporate." The final word works as a release. After all the freezing, hanging and storing, it is a verb of lightness. A puddle is humble and temporary, and it returns to the air. The title helps here, because a thawing Popsicle becomes a puddle. The two choices are made of the same stuff, and the difference is whether the ice is held back from melting.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It is a short, jokey piece, but it turns a technological question about whether to be preserved into an older one about whether we can accept ending. By choosing "evaporate" over "immortality," the speaker makes mortality sound less like a defeat than an ordinary kind of freedom.