The Handcuff King
The Handcuff King
Escape pays for now:
suspend me upside down;
lock glass and steel;
fill fully;
water flowing over.
But if my escapes entertains,
understand that it is my existence.
I can handle building-size milk cans, Chinese water torture cells,
underwater crates and being buried alive.
Faced with flight or forced-fight,
the choice is easy
but understand I must force fight to flee:
no escape is without struggle.
But without escape or the opportunity of one,
I must hang on
and for how long?
Until I burst?
Or until I meet the next world:
the destiny of all that depart?
Explain to me the retreat available:
the extrication that sidesteps;
the evasion that slips the lock,
that springs a liberation.
No, you know no more than I about withdrawal.
You just know more about staying the course
and that won’t help much
when I need to leave, not the visage of death,
but death itself
and its closely shrouded, tightly bound design.
— Zumwalt (2011)
Admin Note:
This poem was published in 2026 at The Good Men Project: https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/faceoff-on-facebook/ along with Zumwalt’s “Faceoff on Facebook.”
“The Handcuff King” is a dark, existential poem drawing on Houdini-style escape artistry to reflect on human struggle, entrapment, and the inevitability of mortality.
Escapology is the practice of freeing oneself from physical restraints like handcuffs or water tanks, which “The Handcuff King” uses as a motif to explore the ultimate impossibility of fleeing mortality. The poem moves from the spectacle of physical escape to a somber meditation on life’s unavoidable traps, contrasting the urge to retreat with the necessity of facing death itself.
“Faceoff on Facebook” is an aggressive, openly ironic poem using violent hockey imagery as an extended metaphor for social media comment-section warfare and digital narcissistic egocentrism. An extended metaphor is a comparison between two unlike things that unfolds across multiple lines of a text, and Zumwalt employs it in “Faceoff on Facebook” to frame oppositional digital comments as a brutal hockey match. The poem scoffingly exposes how online outrage is often driven less by truth or facts than by raw ego, personal boredom, and the side effects of physical isolation.
