The Dark Side

I love dark chocolate.

Actually, I really love chocolate per se (Nikki Giovanni writes: "The reason I like chocolate is / I can lick my fingers / And nobody tells me I'm not polite") I love the sensualness of it - the gooey taste of it in your mouth, the richness of it coating your tongue, the way the pleasure melts slowly into your bloodstream.

I wrote once:

Who dreamt
That joy could be this dark?
That love could be bitten in half
So easily?
That guilt was a girl with sticky hands?

Who knew regret could taste like sunlight?
Or that the defeat of an entire summer
Would dissolve in a single mouth?

When you give yourself equally
There is no surrender
There is only the certainty of being melted and glorious
At the instant of your destruction.

- 'Chocolate'; December 2003

But dark chocolate is a special favourite of mine - there's something about the intense bitterness of it that makes it, for me, the concentrated essence of everything chocolate-y. A really good dark chocolate is like fine wine - that first insistent rosebud of flavour that blossoms slowly into the full, rich flower of an aftertaste. The same heady feeling flowing straight from your palate to your brain, the connections in your head resolving themselves into a network of intense, almost infinite joy.

Some people, I know, don't like dark chocolate - they feel it's too bitter. For such philistines there are many alternatives - milk chocolates, peanut flavoured chocolates, granola bars, even (shudder!) fruit candies. But for the true chocolate connoisseur there is only one true taste of chocolate - and that is the subtle, delicate and amazingly concise flavour of genuine bitterness.

P.S. A friend of mine brought me two huge slabs of dreamy dark chocolate this weekend, hence the rapture. This post is most definitely dedicated to her.