Poetry Friday: The Sense of Taste

Today's our last day exploring the standard Five Senses (stay tuned...next week we'll do a sixth)...TASTE is the order of the day. Feel free to be all bloggy about what your mouth experiences, what your tongue does for a living, or you may even venture to the alternate variant of taste...what's "acceptable" in society...or not.

I got all listy wid it.

Have a good weekend, y'all!


All Girls Want to Be Debbie Harry, or Ten Things on the Tip of Mona's Tongue

1) I love the taste of fake orange. The flavour used in Children’s Bayer aspirin when I was younger. Growing up in that time, parents weren’t told to keep drugs away from kids, so my ‘rents kept the Children’s Bayer in a kitchen cupboard, next to the peanut butter. When I needed an emotional boost (say, when Josie and the Pussycats wasn’t on), I’d go to the cupboard and shake 2 or 3 of those orange beauties in my hand and chomp them down, savoring the sweet fruity flavour. Nowadays I eat Benefiber tabs that come in that same orange flavour, and it always takes me back to my parent’s kitchen, feeling all shades of pre-teen angsty blue, and the solace in little sweet pills. I do NOT, however, love the taste of fake orange in those bottles of syrupy soda-like-goop that comes with a glucose tolerance test…they make me barf.

2) I also love the taste of hard water. Mmmm…iron…. I also love the taste of peppermint Altoids…mmmm…minty….

3) I love to taste words…roll them around on my tongue and inhale their nuances. I’ve had deep conversations with friends about the subtle flavour-enhanced differences in similar words…words like “snarky”, and “snide”, and “cynical”. I will hear a foreign word or phrase and repeat it over my tongue, delighting in the way my mouth rolls over it (or stumbles), creating an emotion to go along with it to store in my brain file…”Jeux sans frontieres”…."Ich bin ein Berliner"...whateverthehell John Cleese says in this movie....

4) Why do we love coffee so much? It’s bitter. It’s like water filtered through dirt. And yet…nectar of the gods.

5) Smell is so interconnected with taste it can scare the pee out of me. I would never in a jillion years eat a skunk’s ass, and yet when I smell skunk spray…gah…I can’t scrape the taste off my tongue for the lifeofme.

6) Nothing tastes as warm and familiar as your lover’s mouth.

7) Human skin tastes like salt, sweat, and alcohol, and never in a million years could a lab replicate that.

8) Ricotta cheese and mozzarella, mixed together, tastes like barf to me. I ignore that, of course, and eat the damn lasagna anyway.

9) That thing about tastes being concentrated on certain parts of your tongue? Totally false.

10) My tongue has been doing a constant dance inside my mouth while I wrote this, and is now admonishing me for drinking so much coffee this morning that dragon-breath permeates every exhale. Where are my damn Altoids?