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
poems 2 die for 