One thing made from many. The treat is marzipan,
selected for the smooth patience
it takes to turn from nasty
crumb into moist
and cloying sweetmeat. The magical
tease of colors, salaciously

sensual shapes. A salacious
bill-shaped tongue licks the surface of the marzipan
hoping for transformative magic
to bring forth flavors, impatient
for new wine to settle in. Moistened
by its own nasty

oils on its own. Not nasty
in the sense of salacious
just a tease offering dry to the moist.
tongue. Marzipan
teases the patient
with a jumpy magic

vaguely reminiscent of the magic
of a sweet and nasty
day long ago in a narrow Chicago bed. The patience
it took to use feet in place of fingers, salacious
and shapely toes like bars of marzipan,
and the sweat that moistened

us beyond love’s typical, troublesome moisture
felt like the uncertain magic
of shaping nuts into marzipan.
The candy box melted on the radiator, a nasty
and pointless cliché, salacious
reminder of the transatlantic patience

I’d thought he could endure. But patience
was not his forté, and I returned to a moist
and chill Chicago, abandoned, salacious,
and jumpy with remembered magic
and a nasty
case of jet lag. No worse than marzipan

the patient magic of returning to bed
after weeks of separation, moist tears and nasty repercussions,
a confusing relation as salacious, webbed and billed as a marzipan platypus.

Thank you, Facebook team, for providing my end words and title.