Fregoli’s Hammer
Everyone sherries a gâteau now and then or
rums a ham secretly, tips a flask in coffee,
guzzles pure ethanol soon as I stop gawking.
Everyone carries a shadow like a fender
needing swift beatings in darkrooms during off-peak
hours to undent their deep, topographic pocking.
Everyone’s someone’s unpaid amanuensis
sneaking in nightly to strike their under-ivories
like they’re not matching feet shoved in different jackboots.
Everyone’s piggy heart rattles with consensus
vis-à-vis coinage, their amorous inquiries
into each other like hogs into a kill chute.
Capgras’s Anvil
Order’s nepotism of the ruins, statute
of the digitizing of extinguished libraries,
catalogue of slaughterhouses’ picket fences.
Order’s repetition of the unit, hirsute
-faced homunculi and matryoshka ovaries
having propagated more perfected tenses.
Order had been ticket punching, gentle rocking,
black bandanas, passengers unhandled roughly,
then the train encountered by a camp surrendered.
Order had been truffle hunting, earth-defrocking
snout a peach-ish pillowcase whose cotton softly
undulated as the snakes inside it hungered.
Cotard’s Stirrup
The trap had not been meritorious centre
of world events for long before the mute senses
foreclosed the breath museum, pawned the teeth tchotchkes.
The map had not been territory since live bees
last swarmed in beards to wag our chinny chins, shocking
chests like batteries, wings expressivist tribute.
The map is not the territory, this spacesuit
is not the naked wonderment of spacewalking,
this vacuum-wrapped rump’s latitudes aren’t Earth’s livery.
The traps between our thighs are squealing out awfully
like wishbones strapped to razorbacks, we portentous
human hammipedes, we porcine kinda-centaurs.
