Napoleon’s penis
was sold at auction

Einstein’s brain
sat in a jar for years

Thomas Hardy’s heart
was left on a kitchen table
where it was eaten by a cat

Tycho Brahe lost his nose
in a duel with a drunken
mathematician, replaced it
with a silver and gold proboscis
held to his face each day with glue

And Mark Twain lamented
corpses floating to the surface
in Louisiana, dismembering
in the wash of rain,
the silted overflow of the river

So nothing is held with reverence
nothing left intact,
ourselves dissembling
sometimes put on display
as curiosity, like a two-headed
calf at the county fair

And once, my own wife
despite my pleading
would not retrieve a chunk
of my thumb caught in a table saw,
thrown across the workshop
and buried in a pile of lumber,
roof shingles, architectural debris.

Nothing’s sacred
I moan, offering another lamentation,
the itch of my opposable
thumb working in opposition
to everything deemed holy,
my own relics
unworthy of veneration,
left as a meal for scrounging mice.