The sinews slowly tighten, the ligaments grow short, The tendons pull like cables toward some contracting court, Where muscles lose their purchase and the limbs forget their will, And what was once in motion finds itself growing still.
The voice that sang at morning now falters, thin, and raw, The larynx gripped by something without a name or law, A dryness in the windpipe, a roughness in the chest, The words come out in fragments, the sentences suppressed.
The eyelids droop like curtains that cannot hold their weight, The bladder loses tenure, surrendering to fate, A cough that fails to finish, a sneeze that brings release Of what it should not offer — the body's slow caprice.
And yet the spirit burning within this failing frame Is fierce with old indignation, and tends the ember's flame, Quick-tempered at injustice, unable to stand by When cruelty passes openly beneath an open sky.
The child who weeps for others, who cannot bear the woe Of creatures caught in suffering with nowhere left to go, Who takes the stray and shelters it, who bridges every gap — This is the heart of Causticum, caught in contraction's trap.
The remedy of tightness, of scar and cord and band, Of what was once supple grown rigid where it stands, Of contractures and of strictures, of paralytic night — Yet somewhere in the darkness, still watching out for right.
It knows what years of weather do to skin beside a flame, It knows the burn that hardens and is never quite the same, It carries in its carbon the memory of fire, Of tissue pulled to tautness on contraction's patient wire.
Give it when the world contracts, when freedom starts to fail, When justice wants a champion and courage starts to pale, When muscles lose their singing and the joints forget their song — Causticum, the burnished, the contracted, and the strong.
