Here’s my rough draft for today, Sunday 01.16.22
The End of the Innocence
Imagine the biggest chocolate bar you could ever see,
even an infinite plane of brown goodness,
all sugar, cacao, milk, this enormous symbol
of excess laid out before you stretching
like a forever-bed of semisweet rose blossoms,
pluck a sweet sticky petal, lick your fingers, she loves me,
pluck another, she loves me not.
Keep at it; go nuts. Break off a big square,
and bite in, chew and chew and swallow,
the first chunk the best, sliding down your throat,
the one they say you never forget,
the rest losing somehow losing something,
each taste duller in steps toward excess.
Until that gigantic bar you thought,
when you were young, would stretch on forever
and ever, turns out to be smaller than it seemed
at first, is finally replaced only by infinite empty space
in its place, gone, eaten to nothingness.
At first there is that full feeling, a bloatedness
that gradually passes, and as you scan the horizon
growing desperate for more, there is no more,
and your sensation of glut ebbs
to all that’s left, a hunger of cold age,
for all that candy you consumed
in greedy mouthfuls of more and more,
all this as unthinkingly as could be,
how this all would never end.
Lanning Lee 