Six short lines, and almost every word is doing two jobs. Dave Bonta's "Substitutionary" starts with a speaker taking stock of his pocket and ends with him cheerfully preparing to eat his hat. In between, the poem asks what we put in the place of love when love won't show up on demand.
The first line is built on a pun. "In the abstract" is an idiom meaning "in theory," and the speaker says he finds no love there. The line break then twists it: "of my pocket" turns "abstract" into a noun, a summary or inventory, as though the pocket were a document with its contents condensed on a cover page. A few words ago we were in the realm of ideas, and now we are rummaging through lint. Love is missing in both senses, in theory and in the pocket. Whatever the speaker is looking for, he is looking in a very small, very physical place.
What he finds is "nothing but a little god / and my hat." The lowercase "god" matters. This is not the capitalized deity of theology but something pocket-sized, perhaps a charm or an idol, perhaps even a coin, since money is a god people carry around. The poem doesn't say, and the ambiguity is part of its charm. The word "nothing" also contradicts itself. "Nothing but" announces a lack and then lists a god, which is hardly nothing. The speaker plays down what is actually a startling find, and the casual "and my hat" lumps the divine in with ordinary clothing.
The title explains the logic. "Substitutionary" is a heavy, theological-sounding word, familiar from doctrines in which one being takes the place of another. Here the idea is shrunk to the poem's scale. Love is absent, so a little god stands in for it, and the hat, which is eaten, stands in for a meal. The speaker doesn't complain about being short-changed. He treats the swap as acceptable, even enjoyable.
That brings us to the last line, "which I am glad to eat." The idiom "I'll eat my hat" usually expresses defiant certainty: if I'm wrong, I'll swallow something ridiculous. Bonta takes the threat and makes it a pleasure. The speaker is not forced to eat his words or his hat; he is "glad." The line can be read as comic humility, a willingness to be wrong or to make do. Given the title and the "little god," it may also echo the idea of consuming something sacred, though that is an inference from the poem's vocabulary and not something the text insists on.
The poem's construction supports this tone. It is free verse with no rhyme, but sound links words quietly. "God" and "glad" share the same consonant frame, g-d, so the two words seem to answer each other, as if gladness were already inside the god. The short flat *a* of "abstract," "hat," and "glad" gives the poem a plain, clipped sound that suits its modest subject. The line lengths also behave expressively. After the longer opening line comes the tiny "of my pocket," then "and my hat," just three syllables. The shortest lines hold the humblest objects, and the poem seems to shrink to fit its pocket. The final line then stretches out again, and it ends on the blunt verb "eat," a bodily, practical word after all the abstraction.
The repeated "my" ("my pocket," "my hat") and the two uses of "I" keep everything in the first person, so even the theological suggestions stay small and personal. The speaker is not delivering a doctrine, just reporting on his belongings.
The poem's significance lies in this compression and reversal. In a handful of words it takes an idiom about theory, an idiom about boasting, and a theological term, and drops them into one pocket. The result is funny, but it also makes a modest claim: when grand things like love and God aren't available in the abstract, we may find them, or their stand-ins, in humble objects, and we can be glad of what we get. The poem leaves open whether that is wisdom or just good humor, and that openness is what makes it worth rereading.