Explaining the Poem

This first began percolating on the day I came across the corpse of a bird that flew into my sliding glass door, his head twisted like the bottom of a semi-colon, his wings brackets around the parenthetical body; of course it immediately drew recollections of Amelia Earhart, Kitty Hawk and the story of Daedalus and Icarus.  Interestingly enough, I had recently spilled melted wax near the spot where the bird lay, a souvenir or stain of a certain physical interlude involving, yes, candles, handcuffs and two…  Picking up the bird gave way to the Karate Kid movies, though I don’t really consider the third because it seemed so out of place.  The 80s reference is for me, and should be for the reader, a call to a simpler time in American cinema where stories were told, events shown and a special effect was added to drive a point home or try something new.  It is also a salute to The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet with which I have identified and immersed myself in my surfing on the net late at night, a cup of decaf in one hand, cordless mouse in the other.  As you can imagine the glories of 21^st Century technology are dominant in the poem, foremost because it is typed.  The final line is a surrender, a sort of poetic salute to those who have braved death in the hopes of furthering some cause.  The final line is also a reference to the letter Ω which indeed means end, but can also be argued to be a representation of a U-turn thus turning the reader around to begin the poem again, a new journey with a new experience and perhaps, hopefully, a new end.

The Poem

freedom buzzing incessantly around my head,
a Zen moment, trapped in chopsticks
then clipped wings
on the table shuddering.  I recalled singing in a
musical called
Don’t You Wanna Be Free?
I nodded in unison with the seizing abstraction below me