Writing this poem constituted my annual “Houdini Séance” for 2019. (Houdini died on October 31, 1926.) It is written in my own style, which I call Improvisational Rhyming.

I wait,
not
for Houdini to haunt,
but
     for the rest
     of us
to meet
     in pretense
     at some séance
table.
     In life
     he slipped off
     handcuffs,
was able
     to doff
straightjacket & chain.
But when
the last curtain
     fell, there was no escape
          to an afterlife,
no certain
     path
          save to nothingness,
     to death.
As for me, I bide
my time
     following my own myth,
sit at times at the table
& scribble—
not messages, but the inevitable
     revealing math.