From Custom and Ache

Some fragments from a short series I put together. Other fragments are going to be used on fortune cookie paper, and others are going to stay buried on this hard drive until the cows come home to Philadelphia. Originally written on 06-23-09. Typed up, and revised on 06-30-09.

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Slip up. Toward the street where dawn unravels her cloak.
Chance was your upper-lip’s unseen canker.
It was hiding behind the protusile flesh flaps
hanging like airplane storage—overhaul—
covering up great flights and silencing miscreant pilots.

*

The double-up is for the bubble butt.
The chancellor has some great rain,
some wide-eye stares and a slipping down
along the avenue in his green shoes.

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Munching on questions: crisps, popped corn.
Digestables come to be used like robins basking,
or Dutch Homes. Dutch footwear. This is how we walk.
This is how we walk on the moon.
This is how to saunter into Pennsylvania.
This is the land of the grouper fish, the sock puppets.
Socket shadows and sockeye theatres. Origami postcards.

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Did you:
underestimate the power of the parcel?
place faith into gaunt grips?
figure on the arithmetic of ebullience?

*

To quote Well and move on. Marriage’s subtle catastrophe.
One word spliced to two voices. One conversation.
Polydipsia; heavy breaths beneath; held back in concrete.
Like barbed-wire. Like highways. Like mountains. Like towers.