Cuisine

If I could eat a word
and chew it like bamboo,
and strip down the absurd
with the flick of my tongue,
I'd ask for more than one.

I could eat soap or sepulcher,
an aplomb, a nexus or fetus,
whatever's not a spider or ogre.
I once had doubt and taboo:
bitter, no doubt, and crumbly too.

Lately I eat more carefully.
That other night when you cried,
I felt that word all over inside.
The drunk hornet harasses the hive.
That word, it eats me alive.