Houdini's Return

They say that Harry Houdini
Was actually Ehric Weiss
With a classical Mother Complex
And a way to escape Paradise.

A failed Hungarian rabbi
and his cheerful, fecund young wife
Never learned their adopted language
Or got used to American life.

But one of their sons had ambition
And dark fears lined his every thought;
From Milwaukee to New York, then touring
He perfected how not to get caught.

He would practice escaping from hand-cuffs
Driven, often unable to rest
Save with his head pressed to his mother
To confirm the heartbeat in her breast.

He could slip out of ropes in a casket
Anchored down to the bed of the sea,
Every manacle, steel box and jail cell
Yielded to his fierce need to be free.

He could worm out of chains as he dangled
Off a building, walk through a brick wall
Or jump off a bridge and then surface,
Shedding his iron ball.

The Socialists called him a symbol
Of the Worker, unharnessed, untamed!
He alarmed police chiefs the world over
Though his feats were not anarchy-aimed . . .

He flew the first plane in Australia,
An escape that brought such joyous peace
It consumed time he ought to be working;
He foreswore this source of release.

When Death stilled the heart of his mother
His anguish was such, he avowed
To indulge the pretensions of psychics
In the hope one could pull back the shroud.

He attended seance after seance
And his mind catalogued ever trick,
Every bell-ring and vibrating table
That the mediums used in their shtick.

He could find none authentic and able
And his rage held the scope of his grief.
He became the most dreaded crusader
Against Spiritualist false belief.

He offended his friend, Conan-Doyle,
The aristocrat author of Holmes,
He exposed every charlatan feeding
The bereaved bogus comfort and alms.

He obsessively wandered in graveyards
He performed and he lectured, he read
He compulsively went on escaping
Though his body contorted and bled.

In his visits to insane asylums
He pondered: What if I go mad?
No strait-jacket, no winding-sheet holds me
No cell nor room they could pad . . .

When a vicious punch caught him unready,
Crushed his abdomen, hastened the end
He rehearsed his wife over and over
On the message he hoped to send

It leaked: causing rumors and falsehoods
And still no one knows for sure
If a man can slip back from Elysium
When his willful desire burns pure.

But in this, the land of self-invention,
What are rules but things to circumvent?
We await the return of Houdini
And escapist maneuvers unspent.