In the middle of the night, coughing, I resorted to one of those mentholated Halls cough drops; candy with a bite. Drifting off to sleep, a few iambs popped into my head, and here I am now, posting a Sunday Poem at 3:07 am.

Candy

A single stagnant drop of sugar, caught and coalesced and cooked to crystal shine.
It’s fricative and fresh, this lump or lolly, taffy, toffee, gumdrop, goo or fairy dust.
It conjures summers, jujubes and dimes. A stick of pixie, lips of wax, and time
To race about, the dog at heel, the swarm of kids, the tinkling ice cream truck, the sweat.

The sweet is sharp; your tongue gets bumps. A crack can catch your gums, cut you, leave wounds as small
As any cut inside your mouth: enormous, one more thing to suck on, strawberry.
We face the same hard choice of every day: to crunch would be to hurry it along.
It’s sweeter far to savor sweets and time before the time and sweets are soft, then gone.

For those of you who have been asking about formal verse: this one started out as blank verse, iambic pentameter. But then I made the lines double length. There is one foot reversal, on “cut you,” where the rhythm is intentionally inverted to accentuate the action. There’s also “strawberry,” which has a phantom accent on the last syllable.

Mostly, though, it relies on strict rhythm and lots of internal rhyme and alliteration.

Which leads to this other musing… maybe you get two for the price of one tonight, both about exactly the same thing. That’s what you get for me messing around at 3am.

Candy II

Imagine

If we preserved our memories in candies… Each one, each flavor,
Releasing a specific other time back into our minds.
Bags of winter nights all minty fresh, first kisses, that time you skinned your knee.
The painful days would slice your tongue that candy way.
The days we don’t recall would be the ones we ate unconscious,
Half a bagful disappeared without our noticing.
Rich chocolate of love, the peppermint of anger,
The anise rum of jealous rage, the coconut of sorrow.
We’d grow bloated on the past.

Some memories, like any other memory, would surface
From the cushions of a couch, sticky, pasted over
Dust and hair and scraps of paper wrapping, and we’d hold them
Pondering whether they are sweet, or just the flavor of regret.