Shootin' rockets to the moon Kids growin' up too soon

Ode to an Ice Cream

Cone. Cardboard brown, lit with sugar to a honeyed hue. Brittle, crissed and crossed, filled with diamonds of dried batter. Ice cream cone batter. Rolled out flat with a pin on a butcher's block, heated in a pan, wrapped gently with the tip tight, the lip opened wide, ready to swallow gulps of ice cream.

Cow udder. Gently squeezed, smooth milk cream flows out, splashes into a tin bucket. Sugar, frothy milk, vanilla bean, churn churn churned. A bucket holds sweet cream ice cream, glinting frosty ice crystals. 

Silver spoon, glinting dully, curve, turn, concave, convex. A reflection only just missed, steel cities, sky scrapers, machines, machines; machines. A clean incision is made. Pure, smoothly separating ice cream from its brother, its mother, creating a crater on the surface of freshly fallen snow, an untreaded planet. 

And each comes together, plop bang smush: round melting scoop on top of ridged unbroken cone. A small pink tongue will lick the ice cream perfectly spherical, its natural roughness smooth, and small white teeth will nibble at the sugar cone. The child will pull off the paper wrapping and pursue the last ice cream trickle tickle until all that is left is the space where the cone tips almost meet, and sticky fingers licked another time, in the hope of one last bit of flavor.

Title Quote: The Tempatations, Ball of Confusion