Escape from Shadowland

I know what Fascism feels like

I lived with it for many years,

Here

In England's green and pleasant land.

But, you know, it wasn't Hitler,

Or Stalin who kept me company

There were other Fathers on the scene by then

Kennedy was there and Churchill

Wilson, Thatcher, Reagan; and that obscure poet,

Tchevchenko

A strange psychotic mixture.

But it was another mixture of James Dean, Brando, Eastwood

The scripted existential rebel hero

Who had claimed me to love way back when

And I soon discovered that the story was the same

How I got so lost down all the days of that drama

So wounded, so confused

A casualty of primal warfare

Hiding underground licking

My raw and exposed flesh

Dodging the crossfire

Ever vigilant in case the barrel turned its black hole eye

Slowly on me

Pinning me up against the wall.

Sometimes I was plotting down there in the darkness

Plotting to escape.

Dreamlike subversion, analgesic romance

To while away the dead time.

Up there at the edge I was catatonic

A puppet whose strings were pulled

By the letters of his Law.

But somehow, slowly,

I became a braver kind of outlaw

A heretic.

Dug ditches with my heels,

Tore up the rules and flung them

In his face

Turned into his Devil

A justifiable target for his impotent retribution.

Then

The falling gavel split the space

The clenched fist, the snarling teeth, the heavy spiteful boot

And worse -the slimy, bloodpurple up-ripper of my flesh.

And suddenly I understood,

With horror creeping its sweat, shivering itself along my backbones

Ecstasy! That was it. Pure enjoyment

In his twisted, spittled face

And I smelt the breathstench, the deathstench

Gazed the wormholes

Watched the skin melt, the bones dust

Felt something leave me and something else return

and I burst out of my eyes into the blue.............gone from that forever.