Master of Humbug

For most of my life, my favorite movie in all of the world was "The Wizard of Oz".

I have been in the stage version three times, playing the Tin Man twice, the Lion once, and the Wizard once on the radio. You don't ever want to sit and watch the movie with me, because I do all the voices, for all the characters, and speak almost all the lines verbatim.

I have seen the movie at least once a year for over forty years. Can't get enough.

Of course, I have read all of the Oz books, read them to my kids, and done some illustrations based on them, but since I am a poet as well, I just had to do some poems about them.

This is the fifth in the series, called "Under the Gray Rainbow" and this one is based on the Wizard, yet all of the poems take a much darker tone than the story L. Frank Baum intended. I see them as psychological profiles of the characters true intentions and feelings, you may judge for yourself.

MASTER OF HUMBUG

There they go again,
fearsome echoes of his daily maneuvers,
their resonance
amplified by the stony chambers,
carrying him to heights
he never imagined
when empty windows still held no terror.

He was born to travel,
so currently he was of course dead, 

ensconced -
getting his rumors 

from the mice that inhabit his walls.

Cheering crowds, happy faces, bells and lights
are no substitute
for books that he cannot read 

in a language long dead.

The semasiologicals are important,

of course,
for he is mighty 

within those pages.

Nineteenth century science
is magic in a fifteenth century world. 

Having read the classics as a boy

was enough to make him 

the wisest in all the land, a wizard.

Boiling smoke and purple plumed hats
are the burning bushes of ignorant masses.

Let them all dance,
gibbering in cheerful abandon,
for he knows the end is here
and they have learned nothing.

He copes with his monstrous shame
by not coping at all,
hiding away,
head in the sand
at the top of the world.

Better to bang a loud drum

with no meaning

than be seen

as a mere man.

He weaves refined prayers
to hide his secret shame
in glassine jars.

The walls are lined with them.

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Shared for OLN with fellow movie buffs over at DVerse Poets

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©2009 Christopher Reilley 

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