Poem: Bad Poem

When I took Introduction to the Creative Writing Minor at Stanford, my instructor Adam Johnson (Parasites Like Us) had us write and share the "worst poem we could possibly come up with." The intention, of course, was to make us comfortable with sharing our writing. After all, if our classmates had heard the worst poem we could compose, nothing could embarrass us for the rest of the quarter. Here is mine.

Bad Poem

I pine, sublime, whenever appears to me
such beauty as alpha-ketoglutarase.
Oh! for such a benevolent carbonyl-laden molecule
I could not speak higher praise.
Her visage appears before me
on a cell phone. But if such an apparatus
were inadvertently defenestrated,
I could find her in my very own cells,
beautiful and lovely and being slowly, slowly metabolized.
Yes, she is a scarlet woman. Look at her!
Her aldehyde is showing! How risque
to bare such electrophilia.
That scandalosity should be masked
with a methyl group, covered
like less divine saccharide derivatives:
oxaloacetate, galactose, even beta-D-fructopyranose.
Not lactose, however. I am lactose intolerant.