Dreaming of Chocolates

It’s a slow day. The clock is ticking loudly, magnified by the complete silence that envelops my room on late afternoons. There’s nothing to do here. I’m bored out of my skin.

Just to have something to do, I put on some music. And then restlessly, I walk back and forth, as if trying to wear down the cold, tiled floor. I glimpse a notebook jutting out from the piles of books I have in the corner, a product of my hoarding fever in the last few months. I think I was trying to fill a gaping gulf of emptiness with mountains of books that I can’t possibly read anytime soon. I take out the journal notebook, sticking out a mile because of its worn cover and yellowed pages.

A quote I scribbled in haste jumps out to me, forcing a second glance. Fernando Pessoa, a most interesting personality, was quoted, “There’s no metaphysics on earth like chocolate.” At the same time, Snow Patrol’s Chocolate fills the air.

Well, this is nice, I thought to myself. I wish I have chocolate right now. This sudden craving reminds me I’ve to do grocery soon. But not now. Now is for quiet and solitude and this poem.

 

Chocolate

by Rita Dove

 

Velvet fruit, exquisite square
I hold up to sniff
between finger and thumb –

how you numb me
with your rich attentions!
If I don’t eat you quickly,

you’ll melt in my palm.
Pleasure seeker, if i let you
you’d liquefy everywhere.

Knotted smoke, dark punch
of earth and night and leaf,
for a taste of you

any woman would gladly
crumble to ruin.
Enough chatter: I am ready

to fall in love!

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