The highway rollover wore him
like a loose jacket, a wind-snapped flag,
like a rodeo bull wears a cowboy,
sanded him down until his arms
were dusted off, re-written
in fibreglass and hooked script.
We were frightened by his make-believe hands,
smooth upholstery knuckles, unflinching
beach ball smell crossed
with baked bicycle tires.
We were frightened of the fishing trip
and the lightning that welded
him to the boat.
We were frightened of those shoulders
retrofitted into clothes hangers
for broken handshakes and bear hugs,
dialled phones and signatures
packed away into boxes
for accountants or the poor.
We practiced our own substitutions,
acting out ghost stories, declaring allegiance
to phantom limbs
while playing high-kick soccer,
awarding exaggerated penalties
for handballs,
offenders chicken-winged
and forced to pirate copies
of hoof-and-mouth disease
for overseas quarantined manicurists.
We wore hand-me-down turtlenecks
and packed scavenged finger-food
for the sergeant-at-arms.
In the sawtoothed canines,
masticating above us in climax beech leaf canopies,
we saw vestigial forests
of terminal arm hair, small sod
melanin huts, knob-and-kettle country
in the vascular ridgelines.
We took flu shots to change our appearance
on the inside, planted memories
of synthetic identities, dusted for fingerprints
in unauthorized hands.
Climbing through polite conversation,
we wore nosebleeds to conceal our altitude,
fake moustaches to hide harelips we’d affected
for counterfeit phonemes, and slipped
into pairs of scissors,
hiding in roughhouses built by play-facing dogs
and the first-draft carbon crystals
of burnt-out engine blocks.
We raised branches from sticks
and trained them into tepees and log houses
for bonfires,
schooled them
in the relative humilities for dry rot.
We placed orange peels
over our eyes and groped
for light sockets,
donned dandelion manes
and crawled through switchblade grasses
with sextants certifying the sky
for seeds.
Having had our wrists slapped,
we grew polycarbonate cups
out of sight in the carpal tunnels
and drank under water tables
at night, where we’d beat snowstorms
to death with flashlights
and proclaim republics
on the accumulated evidence of road salt
and body-counted shadow puppets.
We wore intestinal flora
as a countermeasure against
the invisible hand of decompositional self-interest.
We hung out with stray dogs
who did all of our terrifying for us.
The one with three legs limped along
like a pitchfork, its tines tuned
to the hiss of escaped air
from pierced plastic balls.
Back and forth its head swung,
ripping apart a cloud
or a man’s shirt.