Synaesthesia Sestina

In dreams there sometimes comes the taste of chocolate
spread out across the senses, a blue-sky
thinking that gluts itself on inspiration.
Take that for starters, and then visualise
if possible a citrus tang of fright
with creamy undertones of happiness

as shampoo adverts picture happiness:
a lustrousness, like that of melted chocolate
swirling with comfort, dissipating fright,
as aromatic as an autumn sky.
It’s with the tastebuds that I visualise,
as through the spinal nerve romps inspiration.

Fresh produce is my greatest inspiration:
the pears and artichokes of happiness.
To bite down is at once to visualise,
through insta-filter granting hue of chocolate,
the softly rippled surface of the sky.
(I do not know why raisins taste of fright —

something hard-pressed, as though the taste of fright
were always against the teeth of inspiration.)
My bare feet press against the chilly sky,
the clouds my bathrobe and my happiness
as, opening the fridge for last week’s chocolate,
uneaten bacon makes me visualise

a bristling pig who could not visualise
that outcome, who once oinked devoid of fright,
as happy in the mud as I in chocolate.
Bless you, dear porker, for this inspiration,
and for your insolent piggy happiness
beneath a fatty rasher-streak of sky.

Deny the senses? Would you live on sky?
I lack the mystics’ knack to visualise
in squalor their eternal happiness.
The smell of deprivation gives me fright.
I would much rather have for inspiration
A solid, hand-felt monument of chocolate.

This glowering sky gives me no cause for fright
when I can visualise, for inspiration,
the earthly happiness of lovely chocolate.