By Callum 
White coats move like weather.
They carry clipboards the way priests carry relics,
counting pulses as if counting sins.
Antonin Artaud knew another pulse—
the one that hammers behind the skull
when language breaks into splinters
and the body tries to climb out of itself.
He called for a theatre that doesn’t soothe
but seizes, scorches, scars—
a theatre without anesthetic.
Illness, to him, was not a stain to scrub clean,
but a message scratched onto the bone.
The doctors answer with tidy names,
latinate cages to hold what won’t be held.
They press a cool hand to a burning page
and pronounce it cured when it stops screaming.
But Artaud listens to the scream.
He says the cure is sometimes a costume,
and the costume bites.
He says the patient is a stage
where the god of pain appears on cue
and the audience looks away.
If there is a medicine, it is a lightning strike—
not to numb, but to awaken;
not to silence, but to make the mouth speak fire;
not to stitch the soul shut,
but to tear it open just enough
for the truth to climb through.
The sick and the doctors stand in a room of mirrors.
One holds a stethoscope, the other a torch.
Both are afraid of what the reflection might say.