She Went Into the Lobby for a Box of Junior Mints

The warm & the cool, the embrace &
the gaze, the entangled & the detached,
the original sin called synthesis

when thesis gave its opposite the fruit
from the tree of the knowledge of Good
& Plenty. That’s life: the ambivalence

of licorice, coated in a shell of
pink & white to hide the side effects
which may include the Universe Itself.

Candy is the dandy that wants to melt
in the mouth of decadence, the sweet tooth
of crime, its nature read out like a

sentence passed. It stumbles only to stand
with its cocoa velvet top hat in hand.
It’s the opposite of bittersweet, which

isn’t sweet, but a doubling, sweet sweet,
like hush hush, a sexy that’s sexy in the way
dread is sexy, which is to say not at all.

Still, we get off. Lightly, easily.
With a warning. With a smile full of crowns.
Four out of five dentists agree that the fifth

is an agent of history, progress. History
is a confection, wrapped around the gooey
caramel of the present. Bite down.

The box & the creamy centers. The sugar
& the shock. The hard & the soft. The tongue
& the teeth that watch, yearning to fall out.