Alias razor wire, fashioned after
the free-reed,
bellows-drive instrument, patented
in 1884 by
Sir Charles Wheatstone. Early in its history,
Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Flight of the Bumblebee was arranged for English
concertina.
Used as ramparts in WWI. You’ve seen
archival photographs
of soldiers dangling still, lovelorn, as puppets
in its trusses.
Simple barbed wire garnished with spun helices of high
tensile yield,
various calibers and blade profiles, a colossal Slinky
ribboned with scalpels
that increase vertically and horizontally at once.
An Italian Squeezebox.
Manufacturers’ names like Excalibur, Flight-Guard, Whistler,
Nemesis, The Prodigal, —
so conceived that, once snared, the convict, reflexively
thrashing (panicked
as it flinches into him), ravels himself through
a meat grinder.
In the sun and moonlight, especially seductive.
The intermezzo,
the climactic hemorrhage.