The socks come in a pair, pale as underdone fat, red stripes like two cheap commandments around the cuff. Each wears the same locked grin. Fresh cotton pretending it can argue with lard. This is the gourmando’s little liturgy after the plates: vestments pulled on while the altar is still wet. They do not walk. They wait. They know the floor. They know the chair. They know that softness keeps minutes better than prayer does.

Then the same socks, converted. Eyes crushed shut. A green flood climbing the knit, the covenant coming back up and still not cancelling the order. Esau’s bowl returning through the throat. The body trying to unreceive what the mouth has already blessed. It is not comedy. It is the feast looking for another door and finding only the sock.

The flute is a yellow pipe laid on the green of a cheap abyss, six dark holes like stopped mouths down the shaft, and at the head the grimace has taken office: two bead-eyes, a grate of teeth, the look of a man who sat down to play and found the lap had become the whole parish. No note leaves it. Breath is already mortgaged to the belly. In the old speech this is a ram’s horn that will not sound because the camp is too full of stew to stand. The wood is grease-coloured. The teeth are tithe. Something under the napkin is using the instrument as a face.

The shoe is blue, laces slack, sole white as a cleaned plate, and the grimace lives in the toe-box like a tenant who will not be evicted. Walking was promised. Walking was a psalm. The psalm stayed tied. Width has made the floor a theology. The doorway judges. The teeth in the leather are the honest part: a gourmand idol wearing rubber, asking again, certain the next crossing might feel like mercy if it is only heavy enough.