https://portside.org/2019-07-12/bondage-love

Bondage Love

By John J. Brugaletta

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 straitjacket

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. Brugaletta has published over 390 poems in 87 venues and has seven collections of his poetry in print, the latest of which is Selected Poems (Future Cycle Press). X.J. Kennedy has called his selected poems "a vital contribution to American poetry."