What's the poem Death on a live wire about?

Question

It's by Michael Baldwin and i can't find anything online, not even the poem itself
So if any of you know it.....

Can you give a description of what it's about, any hidden meanings? language?
Thx

Answer 1

Death on a Live Wire

Treading a field I saw afar
A laughing fellow climbing the cage
That held the grinning tensions of wire,
Alone, and no girl gave him courage.

Up he climbed on the diamond struts.
Diamond cut diamond, till he stood
With the insulators brooding like owls
And all their live wisdom, if he would.

I called to him climbing and asked him to say
what thrust him into the singeing sky:
The one word he told me the wind took away,
So I shouted again, but the wind passed me by

And the gust of his answer tore at his coat
And struck him stark on the lightning's bough:
Humanity screeched in his manacled throat
And he cracked with flame like a figure of straw.

Turning, burning he dangled black,
A hot sun swallowing at his fork
And shaking embers out of his back,
Planting his shadow of fear in the chalk.

O then he danced an incredible dance
With soot in his sockets, hanging at heels;
Uprooted mandrakes screamed in his loins,
His legs thrashed and lashed like electric eels;

For now he embraced the talent of iron,
The white-hot ore that comes from the hill,
The Word out of which the electrons run,
The snake in the rod and the miracle;

And as he embraced it the girders turned black,
Fused metal wept and great tears ran down,
Till his fingers like snails at last came unstuck
And he fell though the cage of the sun.

The story tells of a man who watched another climb a high tension wire tower. When the man on the ground asks him why he's doing this, the man on the tower shouts back, but the answer is unheard because of the wind...which proceeds to blow his coat into the wires, completing the circuit and electrocuting the man on the tower until he's crispy and falls to the ground. There is plenty of metaphor and implied connections here if you just look. Who is the man on the tower, who went up there on his own without apparent purpose? Who does he represent? Who is the man on the ground? What was the man on the towers downfall, what was his error, his folly, his undoing? How does this relate to other areas of society? I'm sure you can figure this out....especially now that you actually have a copy of the poem...not easy to come by either.