Tell someone not to think of a white bear and the bear is already padding through their mind. Nathaniel S. Rounds builds a whole poem on that stubborn quirk of attention. "Try not to think about," it begins, and the line ends on a dangling preposition, an opening with nothing yet inside it. The forbidden thing arrives only in the next line, after the instruction has already failed. The reader is set up to disobey before knowing what they are disobeying.
What follows is deliberately ridiculous: "Three Elvis Presley impersonators" who turn into motorcycles and pizza ovens and have "fruit for hands." The humor comes partly from the rapid, unexplained logic of a dream. But the images are not random. An impersonator is already a copy, a person who becomes someone else by costume and habit, so a character who can also become a machine is a small step further along the same road. Motorcycle and pizza oven are both engines of a sort, one made for speed and one for heat. One roars outward and the other sits at home, yet both turn energy into something useful. That helps explain the title, "Michaux-Perreaux Steam Velocipede." The names point to a nineteenth-century steam-driven machine often described as a forerunner of the motorcycle. The poem never mentions it again, but the title sets a solemn, museum-label tone that the body of the poem cheerfully wrecks. A reader may start to wonder whether the poem is picturing an invention, a human being fused with a machine, as something strange and a little comic.
The poem's construction is simple, and the simplicity does a lot of work. There is no rhyme, no punctuation until the dash, and every line stands alone as its own stanza. That gives the poem a drip-by-drip pace, each new absurdity getting its own white space to settle in. The grammar tells a different story, because the poem is really one sentence, stretched from the imperative to the final full stop. The repeated "And" and "who" ("And pizza ovens / And who have fruit for hands") pile detail on detail like a child telling a story who keeps adding "and then." The rhythm begins almost like a steady four-beat line ("Try not to think about") and then loosens as the clauses get longer and stranger.
The most interesting moment is the dash after "hands." It acts like a pause for breath, and the next line picks the phrase up and turns it around: "fruit for hands" becomes "Fruit hands." The first version sounds like a swap, one thing replaced by another. The second sounds like a settled fact, a new kind of body. The poem is not just describing a strange creature but letting the language wear the idea into something normal.
Then comes the final image, the one with a quiet unease in it: hands that "regenerate / When eaten." The line break before "When eaten" is a small trap. "Regenerate" feels hopeful, then "eaten" arrives as a single, flat, two-syllable closing beat. The picture is both generous and slightly horrifying, a body that offers itself and is never used up. Judging by the imagery, the poem may be hinting at how performers, and pop-culture imitations in general, can be consumed again and again without ever running out. Like an impersonator, the fruit comes back each time, a copy that keeps itself supplied.
The poem's significance lies in how much it gets from so little. In seven short lines it plays with the mind's habit of rebelling against orders, mixes the human and the mechanical, and sets a serious-sounding title against a gleefully nonsensical scene. It does not explain itself, and it does not need to. By telling the reader not to look, it makes sure they do, and shows how an image, once placed in the mind, refuses to leave.