He could fly. We saw it
once.
From the front hall.
We watched him wheel in from the atrium upstairs –
giant wings parting the air,
stale from disuse.
His face was heavenly;
feathers covered his arms.
We crawled up to him, petting the feathers,
but so quick his shadow rounded on itself, proceeding to the confinement chamber.
We didn’t speak of what we saw, but we knew he was the Free Man.
Free, he was free as he walked into the meadow,
shattered glass trailing from his hair
and shoes and the long length of his robe.
He didn’t think about crazy,
but as the porcelain slab pulsed through the windowpane
and he jumped out after
he came close.
We only saw his back
as he took off through the meadow—
old wheat and the squish of morning dew
pooled in those unhelpful bathroom slippers—
that’s when he started running.
What is your name, no your real name
Soldier?
Nine feet tall, tan as a redwood.
The cop said he spotted him on Main St.
He was too scared to follow through,
he thought the man was part of the sideshow
until his wife reminded him
that the carnival had left two weeks ago.
They came to see us and they asked us to
identify his break.
Did he eat a lot of yams? They asked.
No one suspected Red, the Irishman,
already out of control when the big nurse’s breasts flopped in our faces.
We just sat and stared, that’s what they wanted.
We were helping a known murderer.
Would you change your mind, sir, if you knew his story?
The man with the claws pinched the cop
and they left.
He, the man they called Soldier or Free Man,
tore right out of here the second
they performed the operation –
or maybe a few minutes after, we couldn’t recall:
Inside those four walls with the best of them,
he told me (before they cracked open his skull.)
He whispered the secrets of life into my cavernous ears
until they were full.
I tore the albatross feathers from an old pillow
and stuck them in your hair and in mine,
tied leather strings around your waist and skull.
God of war with no war cry,
I pitied you.
It was your time.
We thought he had taken Red on his back—
a copper length streamed behind the Soldier
as he left—but then we saw him,
crumpled in the recovery room, feathers
everywhere, some still hanging in the air
or caked to his naked body.
Red’s forehead was as bloated
as his paunch.
I became the Free Man as quickly as I left –
free because I stood apart.
My voice was chained up with my father.
I screamed to the free expanse,
knowing it would never come again. Then
I ran.
What would you do in a day
if your words didn’t come?
And what if it was your life?
Outside, I am the Soldier, the one who kills –
the baby killer.
They reminded me every day I was in there:
There wasn’t a place in the world I could go.
My feet dragged on the hot gravel, bare and ragged by now.
They saw him in Tulsa, eating a raw carrot,
his back hunched over, failing.
We wanted to know if he’d met up with his wife,
her breath stinking of the flames she swallowed whole.
When I smelled them on my trail, I caught a train to Long Beach,
warmed my feet in the Pacific for the first time in twenty-five years
and started flying.
He moved like a stray, a praying mantis struggling on a crushed leg
to group therapy.
This was not his place,
he never belonged here among the surgical knives and Clozapine,
the weekly blood tests that went along with it.
This was never his home.
