poem, poetry, postmodern, escape, The Great Escape

ESCAPE

cue: Steve McQueen
trying to jump the border
wire into Switzerland
on a captured motorcycle

things escape me
they dance away

or used to
but now seem
at this stage more
inclined to hobble

and I laugh
as I watch them
unable to match in
velocity the imperative
to leave

end of Empire, never
an embodiment of its
expansion but
anyone better
to deal with
its declination

conjugate the verb
to colonize, decline the
abstract noun
“imperialism”
that’s
its noun category but
nothing abstract about
its impact and
toll on humanity

Norman, Anglo-Saxon/Viking,
Germanic, Latinate
delve deep into
the linguistic roots and
there’s your
causality, there’s your
ideology

there’s everything on the line
at this moment of
impending self-
destruction primed
by wholesale denial

cue Steve McQueen
box-office dynamite
trapped in the coils
of impenetrable wire