When the plates turned cherry red It might have been a good time to stop. But how often can you conduct An experiment like this? I bypassed the fuses And screwed down the safety cutouts It was a nice piece of equipment A little unstable at times Very sensitive And yet robust in output And how often do you find someone With a similar piece of equipment One that goes to 11? One that can pick up the star-sounds? And generally you hook up in parallel Or even series But not cross connect Input to output Every engineer knows That positive feedback loops Are unstable. But the effects were amazing Things I'd never seen before Both devices rose to the occasion (For a while) But eventually I smelled a burning smell And there were some wild fluctuations And finally the smoke came out The magic smoke And everything stopped working And now I have to pick up the pieces. The output is shot The power supply will probably need A complete rebuild I certainly don't trust the rectifier As far as I can throw it. And there's a whole subsection Sensitive detectors Just blobs of melted metal I may never be able To put that back together I can only imagine The shape the other device Must be in. Was it worth it? Even failed experiments Tell you something But this wasn't a failure It was glorious (For a while) And opened new vistas of inquiry And I really didn't know The equipment could stand That level of strain And still survive (After a fashion) Will I try it again? Can I not? Must I?