escapist

            To melt into the melee of madness,
        I fold away my storm-soiled feathers,
    Stuff them into sleeves of sadness,
Button the whole satire up to a choke,
  And hang the tail of my crumpled coat
With a jangling, just-married joke
    Of worry-weights on telltale tethers,
Trudging them like a jade-spaded plow
  Across the furrow-proof unforgiveness
Of a pavement poured from sweat-of-brow.
      I’m no party to popular enslavement,
Yet I smoke to prove there once was a fire,
  Not because I’m another dying spark of apathy,
As I acquiesce to pretend;
    No, because I burn from deep within:
An ember of participatory absence,
  Smoldering in my heart, the cardinal trick
Of being among, but on a stunt above,
      All that looks like it shouldn’t.
It’s a show, a sham and a shameless shtick
  To traipse when I know I can fly,
To buy the farm but hang burlap drapes
    And risk my thoughts to the greyest sky.
But I haven’t surrendered the daydream:
  I can’t, I couldn’t and it’s too tall to be taken,
A towering stalk of stowed-away power,
      Packed like a puck in a private pocket
By the magic of my quiet imagination.
  The critics can come, the Stygians and cynics,
All grimaces on short legs and a glower,
    To rifle through my bag of gimmicks
And yank the yellow off my water-squirting flower;
  Even as I’m chin-dunked, dangled and shaken,
    They fumble for the faith they’ve forsaken—
It won’t likely be mistaken for that scrape-faced token
  As it comes free on a spank to my pants,
Striking the ground with glance and clang,
      A sudden manhole cover on a bounce and bang,
Until it wobbles flat upon a wide-open chance:
  So south from my skivvies on a shameless shimmy,
I fall with it, tipped like a hat into my chest,
    Through the very root and rock and rage of reality—
Like wonder-tripping Alice, torn ticket in hand,
  Jouncing giddy-down the hole on the echo of
“Fairfarren, you banal and burdened beasts!”
      No hands have grip enough to seize a hope,
No whip sharp enough to crack out a wish’s wheeze;
  I may languish for a limit inside a scheme
Or collect crumbs to feign the feast,
    But there’s no capable cage for the dreamer—
Only a turned page might portend my way of escape.
  The wanton world is a heavy bell,
The pulse of its knell on my weathered nape
      Might as well be a lesson on how to spell
Diatomic hydrogen;
  I’ll take a tank of that and a ropeless Zeppelin,
Because, windblown and gone as I go,
    Truth sails with fantasy on the
Whimsy-tipped brush of strange artistry
  Across the overcast of monochromatic drudgery.
Let me be a flightful painter of that kind,
      A Mercurial mage with winged foot
And a near-immortal mind;
  That I might testify, now, by just one wistful,
Heart-scratched soliloquy,
        How Houdini himself,
For all the binding weight of his luck and life’s work
    To cheat death and beyond all danger be free,
        Might’ve snapped his very last hidden key
            For a handcuffed envy of me.

—for my friend, Michelle, and all other dreamers
You can check out her super cool way with words here:
https://herwritinghaven.com/

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    Poetry: However Our Waking Goes
        https://windstrewn.com/2018/10/15/however-our-waking-goes/