Toasted Gouda and ham on oatmeal bread, crisped to black with butter. Hot in the middle, Creole mustard. Fat cauliflower bouquet (chou fleur!), corals of broccoli, orange carrot rounds good for your eyes, soba noodles sweet ginger stir fry in sesame oil. Pointed soft with a snap triangle of  dark chocolate held between finger and thumb. Romaine lettuce leaves. In a bowl. Cold olive green olive oil, balsamic vinegar sweetened and tart-ened and darkened in old wood. Swedish gravel bits of cut oat, almond, seeds, soft chew of date relieves the grind of twigs and sticks on molars. Cappuccino. Bitter, deep-berried, mellowed with milk and air.  An apple. Full of juice, white-fleshed. Strips of apple skin shredding between lips and teeth and tongue. The rattling of seeds. Forbidden. Desired. 

Somewhere between the esophagus, the stomach and the intestine, the Intention (kinship, love, community, culture, economy, geography), the Religious Implication (God, Guilt, Eternal Life, Eternal Damnation), I listen to voices, music, breathing, traffic, insects, birds, heartbeat, I hug my son, I eat, I do yoga flexing muscles extending space breathing breath, I teach, I share, I yearn for True Love, I read, read, read with my eyes (the green ones and the mind's), I run, leap, play, be-friend, I make Art, I contemplate, I work, I wash dishes, I travel, I fold, I sleep, I worry, I rise above, I fall below.  I eat an apple. Lots of apples. And many other things.

Living feeds the soul. And the soul is hungry. Hungry every day. Its stomach as big as the universe, its belly full of stars, stars like apples, red, ripe round life in the tree of the heavens. So many stars. So many!  

How will I eat them all? 

And while I wonder and feed my soul, wide-mouthed and bottomless as a baby bird, inevitably delicately violently, indifferent and in love, this life consumes me.