Poem 36 of 36 Based on The Twilight Zone, Year One: Episode 36 
dedicated as a promise to my eldest daughter Angie

A World of His Own
by Michael Romani

A young girl's promise holds the key
To a world of imagination and poetry
How then do you write a really good story
Daddy won't you show me through your poetry?
A father remembers his childhood's fantasy
Answering yes - as it should always be

The scene opens on a playwright named Gregory
While his sweet Mary mixes a cocktail of posterity
A toast has been raised to this perfection
While the happy couple have each other as inspiration
Sharing a sip while a darker reality peers in
It seems Mrs. Gregory has found her husband's sin

Knocking on the door, she announces that she's home
Jealously rushing in to find that he is all alone
Disturbed; she wanders searching for the missing
Who was that sweet Mary that he'd been kissing
She wonders aloud if she's suffering from hallucination
As she tells the vivid details of his imagination

Accusations of philandering start to fly and fly
Until the playwright defends again the verbal fly-by
Characters, you see, develop a life of their own
This is particularly true deep inside the Twilight Zone
He does his best to explain how characters live
Unwilling to simply take but to demand to give

She refuses this vapid excuse of an explanation
Balking at the places as to strength of imagination
The playwright won't let her call for a psychiatrist
As step by step, she goes over nothing that she missed
Telling the truth of how characters can be created
Snippets of dictation tossed on the fire.. she'll have him committed

Attempting to illustrate, he dictates Mary into life again
And so he does and much to the chagrined Mrs. West's surprise
Mary walks into the house and into the writing room again
Both women stand there semi-startled by their shocked eyes
Mrs. West's tune changes and it's all been in vain
It seems now it's a fiendish plot to prove she's insane

His wife threatens to give out her loudest scream
Casting his dictation on the fire and ending his dreams
Whatever is created and obviously be destroyed
Just another writer's trick for his eager employ
The life of a writer can be so very lonely
But the writer's imagination does not equal infidelity

But, there it is, she, in all of her tortured perfection
Cannot stand another moment's though of his dictation
She seeks to flee and begin life in a new kind of direction
Her sense of superiority is studied in its rich inflection
The crocodile tears do not even please the crocodile
Her underwhelming lack of love offers up no sort of denial

But a writer's imagination knows it's own obstacles
Where even giant red eyed elephants are not too difficult
To put into a hall way in a vain attempt to get her to stay
When she shrieks in complaint he tosses this idea away
She is no longer amused with the trapping of his imagination
As he pulls from a wall safe,  proof that she too is his creation

Her impeccable flawlessness had been meant to be sublime
Now his wildest imagination has been lost to the flow of time
For now she has resisted and defied the writer's steel will
And with this, he has suddenly lost all sense of thrill
It seems he had forgotten to give her any human frailty 
She tosses her own dictated tap in the fire as if tawdry

AS the dictated tape begins to crinkle and burn
She becomes flustered and lost as she soon learns
Burned up into that moments' moment of oblivion
He at first hurries to dictate her back but decides to move on
Leaving well enough alone, he instead brings back his Mary
There's no need to settle on a character that contrary

Describing instead his heart's truest sense of desire
Until Rod Serling appears as if to confer and conspire
The writer decides to teach Rod a stark lesson
Throwing Serling's own tape into the flame with no hesitation
There within a blink of the eye, Rod Serling is gone
Now under the writer's complete control, the show goes on...

(c) September 29 2017  Michael Romani
All Rights Reserved