New Material

Hey I just wrote this! I haven't written a poem for a little while, maybe a month or so, and this one I kinda like. It's about food though, which sounds pretty dumb, but I found a way to make it transcendent, which redeems it completely. That's my trick to try to sound smart (I stole it from John Keats): if you make anything sound transcendent, you sound like a G. I could probably write a poem about fuckin, like tying my shoes or something and with enough prodding and use of delicate (if pretentious) language make it seem big and momentous. Which, may I add, isn't necessarily synonymous with good. So, without further compromising my poetics, here it is!

It all runs down a river of red, of blood, of sweat,
Of dusty ages spent underneath the earth and locked within
Slick green walls of glass, a single polymorphous stream
Of sublimated grapes and transubstantiated soil caught
In the momentary swell of a bottle, the briefest blunted whiff of
A cylinder that is a glass I raise to my health and turn into a sip
That is more than red and more than wine but is some mysterious
Sum of flavors drawn from an earth that is some mysterious sum
Of mysterious sums, countless complicated sums that have little
To do with math but add up just the same.

Short and sweet. This isn't part of the poem anymore. It's just me rambling, and turning this post long and bitter. A quick disclaimer about that thing you may or may not have just read: I used "sublimated" incorrectly. However, I really like that word, and so will use it in just about any context, even if it that means it must be used inappropriately. "Hey Chad, how are you doing today?" 'Oh great, I just sublimated the lawn. It was getting shaggy.' Or, "You know what, I think I really sublimated that test today. Turned right to gas in my hands." Hm, can you sublimate a solid that doesn't have a liquid phase? You can't turn paper into a liquid right? If you heat it just burns. Straight to a gas. Nothing to skip, ergo unsublimatable. Well, I realize that I don't actually know what the word sublimate means. I also realize that I should avoid the barest mention of science, lest I give my own stupidity away. I do know this, however: kinase kinase kinase. I'm out.