Miss Confection

[geoff]

Hello Chris,

Some thoughts for you:

Ms. Confection

I’ve eaten your words
of vanilla and saffron,
pilfered from extracts
of orchid and crocus, ...read Dale's comments and agree; the "pilfered...crocus", while nice, didn't add much to the piece for me. In fact, they broke from the patter of the other stanzas, where origins are ignored in favor of introducing new flavors and topics.

suffered the blackened pod
and crimson stigma
you pressed into suspicious
razor-blade wafers. ..this stanza went over my head in terms of what it was trying to convey, especially the stigma and wafers

I swallowed macaroons
and marzipan swine,
shredded coconut figments
of raw pastry regrets. ...perhaps just from my reading at the moment, but I am not convinced that "of" is the best preposition in the stanza's fourth line

Cyanide rumors whispered
over embittered almonds
are your cloying toxic epistles,
their message deficient. ...this is a poem that feasts on adjectives, but I found them to be a bit overbearing in this stanza. That being said, the idea behind this stanza is my favorite in the piece

Unsavory is the confection ...the inverted structure to open the stanza gives it a much stronger punch
fabricated with honeyed contempt,
mince word pies in disguise
meted out half-baked. ...i was left thinking that the poem actually could be lengthened; this did not strike me as an ending. We get a number of stanzas about the lengths the speaker has endured, but just when we get a taste of a response, the poem ends somewhat cryptically. I am not sure just who is fabricating the "confection" at the close; still the "you" or has the table turned to the speaker (I apologize for being a bit tired at the moment, so it is entirely possible I've missed something huge!

hope this helps; thanks for the read!