Jacob Carl Harksen
Escapists
Love--
if you'll be my Sacco,
I'll be your Vanzetti.
They can sentence us to death
but they can not resign us to it.
We'll allow the gavel's resound
and go down to the gallows together.
With our hands shackled this way
we can only shake on it
with our backs turned.
Even this becomes just
a simple clasp of hands
between two condemned.
I trust you more for it.

Love, they are trying to lock us away
for good. To put us in that same
iron birdcage where Peace was put
to rest, and squawked loudly but
couldn?t beat Her wings hard
enough to break the bars
or the bricks of Her cell floor.
Love, they want to charge us
with twice as many volts as Her
when She said No, and took the chair.
I have seen the smoke curling from Her hair,
dark like ours.
 
Because Love, you're a draft dodger, and I,
I am with you, in the courtroom when
you smile your toothless howl of a grin
down the throat of some judge and jury,
to tell them, Send me to Sing Sing
and Ill sing all day.

They tell us we're guilty,
and you don't feel it but
Love, orange has never been your color.
It is time to get out of this country.

Gather the spoons and sharpen
those toothbrush-shrapnel-pickaxes,
we will dig ourselves out by hand.
Though our hands are bound
and our heads are covered,
we will rise from this stone tomb
to pull the stale linen from our eyes,
now adjusted to the darkness we find.

There are tunnels underneath,
hallowed and fallow where
the stones have not echoed
the pound of heels or the slap
of damp feet for decades.
We can use them to outrun the guards
you and I
underground and overlooked 
by the time they catch up
with our breath,
it will have long gone cold.

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Copyright 2007 Jake K.M. Paikai