THEY NEVER OPENED THE DOOR(A Love Poem for Clive)
They never cared about the skin,
only the scream behind it.
They measured us in silence,
stitched our mouths with rules and fear.
But you—
you taught the wound to sing.
You kissed the scar until it bloomed,
turned pain into a cathedral,
where flesh remembered it was holy
and monsters were only truth without makeup.
They said hide it.
You said open it.
Open the body.
Open the dream.
Open the door they welded shut
because it frightened them to feel.
Steel grew veins in your hands.
Machines learned desire.
Angels bled honestly for the first time.
They marched with laws and numbers,
boots pounding rhythm into obedience—
but your rhythm was different:
heartbeat, heartbeat, heartbeat.
Not hate.
Not fear.
Love sharpened into vision.
You loved the outcast so fiercely
that hell itself became a refuge,
a place where nothing had to pretend.
They never cared about us—
about the broken, the bent, the beautifully unsealed—
so you built us another world
inside the body.
A biomechanical prayer:
bone wired to dream,
nerve soldered to imagination,
pain transformed into permission.
This is not horror.
This is devotion.
This is flesh saying yes
where the world said no.
And we are still opening doors
because you showed us
that beyond them
there is not punishment—
only becoming.
— Daniel FX Staal
