Desire is usually described as a flame or a fever. In "vantesalad" it is an appetite, and the poem keeps pressing on that comparison until the speaker's longing starts to look like a life sentence. The speaker is consumed by wanting someone, can't explain the wanting, and chooses to stay loyal to it anyway. By the end, hunger has stopped being a problem to solve and has become a promise.
The structure carries this idea. The line "the hunger never stops" returns like a drumbeat, each time with something added: first the hunger devours, then it goes "hunting for you," then it does so "although lodging in its worst frame." The speaker is first the victim of the hunger ("each part of you" is devoured, and the "you" there may even blur into the speaker), but gradually the hunger becomes a predator with a target. The poem never lets the reader forget which way the hunger points. The final version of the refrain, "that never stops hunting for you," ends on the pronoun, and then a two-word line closes everything: "never will." It reads as a vow and also as a door shutting.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. It is free verse, with lowercase letters, almost no punctuation, and "its" written without an apostrophe. That bareness suggests a confession, something said quickly and privately. Sound still does some work. "Hither and thither" has an old-fashioned, restless swing that matches eyes wandering over a body. "Meaty and tender" and "creeps and oozes" use paired words, and the second pair is deliberately uglier. The line breaks are also short and clipped, so the poem's pace feels held back, as if something larger is pushing against it.
The imagery moves from the physical to the almost abstract. In the second stanza the eyes travel "from your shoulders to the curve of your back / from your neck to those fingers," a sweep that ends on a wish for touch, "whose soft caress I crave." Then the food vocabulary widens. The hunger wants "the meaty and the tender," the body, but also "the kind and unkind that creeps and oozes / which doesn't take form nor oblige to digest." Here the speaker seems to want the other person's moods, faults and invisible qualities too, things that can't be chewed or swallowed. This is why the hunger can't end. Nothing can satisfy a hunger for something that can't be eaten.
The fifth stanza turns to guilt and illness. The feeling is "almost a felony" and "a cruel ailment with no remedy," yet the speaker "persever[es] in this allegiance." Crime, disease and loyalty are very different frames, and the clash is deliberate: the speaker can't decide whether this is a sin, a sickness or a faith. Then comes a run of near-contradictions: "a stillness with no life," "a discretion without consideration," "a senseless motivation." Each phrase takes a respectable quality and hollows it out. The sentence resolves into the plain, abrupt "i dive," with no reasons offered, which is how a plunge into water feels.
The strangest turn is the claim of "contentedness / one that a thousand teeth / are unable to seek." The speaker has found something like peace inside the hunger, a peace that mere biting and devouring could never reach. This reverses the poem's logic. Satisfaction would end the hunger, but the hunger is what the speaker has come to value. The closing simile, "deep like the trenches of the eyes," links back to the wandering eyes of stanza two. The trenches might be sunken, sleepless sockets or simply great depth, so looking, longing and exhaustion fold into one picture.
The title is an unusual coinage, and I won't pretend to decode it. The "salad" at its end may hint at a mixture, which would fit a poem that blends body, appetite, guilt and devotion, but that is only a guess. The subtitle «for years or for hours» is clearer in effect: it makes the length of the longing impossible to measure, so the feeling seems to sit outside ordinary time.
The poem is significant for how it reworks a familiar idea. Love-as-hunger is common, but here the hunger is not a lack to be cured. Its endless, unreasonable persistence is the proof of devotion, and "never will" turns that persistence into a choice.