Dear Colin Clive
The remedy: anesthesia at the back
of the throat, numbness spreading
up and out, down and in as your grip
on the stem of the glass grows loose
like your consonants. The difficulty:
to keep a human heart beating,
the seeming-simplicity of lifting
a creature toward the flashing sky
with the turn of a crank, with pulleys.
With ropes. The electric crack
of ice in the shaker, the lurching fade
of promises. We lie about our need
for a second skin. Each time you’re asked
again to cry out, It’s alive! another
bolt slides home against another
oak-plank door. Each time the Tesla
coil snaps its synapse whip across
the cold stone, your surgical gown
tightens across your chest—and mad
or playing mad matters less and less.