Dead Man's Lever

the instruction manual was explicit:

in the inconvenient event

of even an ordinary death

not to be pulled

merely

in the event of .

concert of relative motion

unidirectional,

iron-encased

even in that less failsafe era

future corpse rally

to defeat the present

one unfinished trip,

latticeworks of contingency

when everything pressed forward

one lever at a time

falls suddenly back