HOW TO END UP IN A LOCKED WARD

by Michael Lee

By way of explanation,
I offered this:
“Okay, here’s how it is—
        there’s a tape playing in my head on an infinite loop,
        it says, ‘Bob, have you deveined the shrimp yet?’
        but I don’t know Bob
        or why there is such an urgent need for shrimp.
        This is relatively unimportant, however,
        because the tape is only a carrier signal.
        Laid over top of this is a frequency
        that is explaining to me in real time
        precisely what I am relating to you now.
        Just below this are schematics,
        (they are plans for bridges,
        specifically, bridges in San Francisco,
        I absolutely recognize them as such
        though I am not an engineer,
        my brother is an engineer,
        why would they send them to me
        and not him?),
        and somewhere in the space between these two
        is a third waveform,
        an additional message
        that I cannot quite make out.
        It is trying to communicate
        critical information,
        but in order to access it,
        in order to eliminate the maddening static,
        I must hold all these signals in my mind simultaneously,
        and I can’t do that,
        I can’t concentrate hard enough.
        So I guess what I’m asking is
        can you help me to decipher this message?”
And they said that they could,
if only I would sign a few papers.