will stop at nothing,
singling out his thinnest of existences
as if it sifted out the depths of his dreams—
what’s authentic never netted, caught-onto,
stepping out onto sets, so unfit and oft petrified
(where the past awaits like a walk-on on strike)
dressed in less and less, at best a towel or pelt—
selves he’s peeled off a sheet or would
papier-mâché with other’s newsprint,
mostly repossessed obits, other’s fingertips, spit.
The Imposter is not who he thinks he is.
A part of him un-cued, met or teamed up with
like this life that’s been shot up with blanks,
killed off, famously, slash after slash
and then filed under one theory, another.
The Imposter doesn’t sound like he looks
misprinting it till it’s mostly this cue card with these unfeasible themes—
more of me I’ve accrued over time, minus any us that you’d ever have mine,
this I I’ve ad-libbed and built-on but then billed as yet one more beginning
or a diary he’d raided, page after page of pill-white, this flipping—
the signs his but not him, till the gaps themselves had meant more
or how he’d come to make a living by merely playing at being.
The Imposter never means what he says
like in the bio he’s retired on the table—
a tent to crawl into when night has arrived,
where it lingers on the decline of his ceiling like an ex-star
whose name he’ll recite till its stilled, this enemy out mastered,
another universe to rest on the tongue, the eyelashes swung lid to air.
In the morning, his mind tinged with a light crass and lawless,
he’ll know nothing by heart or the row and the heat it unleashes.
Text is sacred—the next word he’s secured is his shadow
which he’ll carry across hills with their two-sided history,
rivers, so rusty, the sun is revised on their surfaces,
till this darkness is just another way of saying brother or twin.
The Imposter has only one regret. At least that’s how he tells it.
A story so real it will illumine, restore, everyone who he’s sold on it.
