Bondage Love

Houdini's audiences loved him.

They were poor people, illiterates:
hod carriers, icemen, washerwomen,
undernourished kids.

They understood what it meant
to have your hands manacled,
your feet tied,
to be put in a straightjacket
then in a box
and sunk.
They knew what it was like to have no way out.

It was the way the world made love to them.

So he showed them, without a word,
that one could have no way out,
not a single, possible way out,

and get out.

John J. Bruegaletta, Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2019)