They thought they had him
boxed in, contained, constrained,
but he would not be truncated, cast aside.
He would make a quiet escape, proceed
carefully so they would not realize,
until it was too late, that he was free
of their control, their rejection, their spite.
They wanted him in their psychic morgue,
one more corpse sacrificed on their altar
of conformity, but none of them wanted
to play a ram-less Abraham, and so he
would be a latter day Isaac free to come down
the mountain of their solitude.
That was all he desired, freedom to think,
to ponder, to reflect, to meditate
on the state of his mind, his world.
He was never a rebel, needed no revolution,
but in their view anyone who deviated
from their singular group-thought was a danger,
ideas were weapons that could
bring down their sense of one great self.
He cared nothing for that, for them,
for he knew that no prison short of death
could mute his fertile mind, and ideas
would well up and percolate freely
and they could never hope to dam their flow.

First appeared in New English Review, November 2023
https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/step-right_up/