No Thanks, I Already Ate

Potato salad you don't refrigerate
will rapidly deteriorate.
The mayonnaise will coagulate
as the eggs begin to mutate.
Flies land and contaminate.
The smell your nose will permeate.
If you eat it, your organs disintegrate.
Soon, you will regurgitate.
Your clothing with puke will saturate.
Stomach heaving makes you perspirate
in amounts that are inappropriate.

Potato salad used to make me salivate.
But from now on, I'll keep it off my plate.

-B.C. Byron

The inspiration for this poem may be familiar to you. When I was in college I had a roommate that would do “experiments” in the shared refrigerator. When I first moved in and put my things into the fridge, I noticed plastic bag with a slowly bubbling, chunky liquid in it. The grey-green substance inside was obviously well past the date when sanity expires so I began carrying to the garbage can, pinched between two fingers and held at the maximum possible distance from the rest of my body. I had assumed the former food substance was left behind by a long ago deceased tenant and that I was just the first human brave enough to touch it. I marveled at the robustness of this plastic bag that somehow withstood the toxic matter inside.

I was stopped on the way to the trash. My new roommate snatched the bag and informed that he had been working on this heinous project for several months. He’d saved bit from multiple meals and combined them in this sack for science. I’m not sure what result was expected from this experiment. Maybe he was testing chemical weapons?

Don’t do science in the fridge kids.