Sweetness He Swore Off

Lyrics

Found on Corvo.
One road in, one road out.
Tucked beneath a volcanic stone near the crater lake.
A stack of paper, tied in faded blue ribbon.

Your handwriting is a slant I think I recognize.
“My love, October 1995.”
“Happy third, my darling, 1998.”
“Just because... February 2001.”
Page after page, the ink is almost gone.
It smells of old vanilla, and the damp Azorean dawn.

Vegan Victor, in a white coat, in a room kept at eighteen degrees.
You taste the sweetness from Ecuador, from Venezuela.
You roll it on your tongue, and then you spit it out.
Is this the sweetness you swore off?
The love you taste but never swallow?

Back in the lab in Brussels, it's a science.
The clean snap of the bar, the melt, the finish.
You write your notes on acidity in a clean, white book.
No room for anniversaries, for words like “always.”
Just a profession of holding something close,
and learning how to let it go.

Vegan Victor, in a white coat, in a room kept at eighteen degrees.
You taste the sweetness from Ecuador, from Venezuela.
You roll it on your tongue, and then you spit it out.
Is this the sweetness you swore off?
The love you taste but never swallow?

Did you bring them all this way just to leave them?
Read them one last time in the fourteen-degree mist?
Did her name on your lips taste like single-origin cocoa?
A memory too rich to ever digest?
From the sterile room to the edge of the world, just to leave a stack of cards.

I’m holding your Octobers.
Your “just because.”
The paper is soft now from the sea air.
A stack of sweetness.
Never swallowed.
Just tasted.
And left behind.