He was once her personal chef, handpicking only the sweetest unripened words, drizzling them with lover’s honey until his fingers became as sticky as the succulent phrases he fed her.

Her appetite for the cuisine of amor was whetted by his experimentation and experience.

She could have cared less about the calories. 

It was the fact that he cooked up such delicious poetry just for her that made her hungry.

Each morsel of endearment he fed her was marinated in metaphor, each flute of passion he poured was aged in imagery.

Their life together was a feast of infinite preparation and consumption.

But, as with fine wine and food, it is possible to become sated on epircurean love sonnets.

It wasn’t long before the exotic spices he pinched over his nouns upset her delicate system.

It was just a question of when before his intricate, intimate sauces became bland and mundane to an overstimulated palate.

And that is the moment when she started sneaking out at midnight for greasy slang and polyunsaturated cliches.

The heartburn made her feel alive.

She left one day for a busboy who constantly cleared away her half-eaten sentences and kept her spirit immaculately empty.

And the chef?

He sits alone in his gourmet studio now, concocting linguistic linguine and other entrees of gastronomical grammar.

There are still so many figures of speech to be baked, puree’d, and served on a bed of passionate verbs.

But there is no lover to feed anymore, no significant other to marvel at his magic.

The studio steams with the savory smell of tonight’s spicy syntax…all that delicious language just going to waste.

He sighs as he turns on the garbage disposal and forces his unwanted poetry deep down the drain.

Copyright 2010