And so one of the things I was able to do with the Poetry
Center is sort of like do some research in terms
of books and other things.
And so there's a series that I'm working on--
I worked on in terms--
and it's called The Importance Of A Book.
And so each book that I mentioned in these sections
actually speak about incarceration
in some kind of way.
There's a book by Robert Hayden, [American Journal],
and there's a poem where Robert Hayden went
into the prison and working with these individuals.
And so I talk about Mitchell Jackson's book,
The Residue Years.
There's a few of them.
And so one of the things, I think books,
especially for people that's on the inside
becomes a gateway to--
really a gate-- when you talk about literature giving you
another world, but when you're on the inside, it really does
give you another world.
And so these are--
in each section, there's the premise of a book.
289-128 The Importance Of A Book.
One.
"American Journal came in a cart dog-eared to page 18
"the prisoner," as if to start there
in media res, dear Hayden.
The I in me no longer lives.
It is gone, I confess.
The collective we, too, is no better, plus the walls
are gray not green.
But no, you are not alive.
Again, I do not exist, comrade.
I do between life and death.
There is a space with no clock, no marker of time, no calendars
to strike out the day or days running together after lock in.
I think-- the pad then feels itself with scribblings
like ownership is mine even in this cage.
Brokenness dictated by time is torture--
writs, habeas corpuses, motions denied in a house
without doorknobs to turn.
The cockroach caught became a pet.
At Christmas my cellie snorted white lines
to escape physical torture of the mind,
cascading in and on itself, rapid then slow--
a program of absence and madness."
Two.
"Metallic reflections reveal dull,
dullness distorted, the reflection a cell.
A social silent critique is always louder in a dream.
Damn ricochets against the walls in anger.
Convicted in the womb ends page after agonizing page.
Is this really my life, I question,
not knowing who I was.
In the light I sit now and wait.
On yellow legal pad, the protagonist.
Guards flood his cell.
I never knew said story as contraband, yet risk is reward.
In protean wilderness, only the past
ripples the dimensions of guilt or innocence.
And at balance by the sea a list of tools--
toothbrush, single-blade razor, metal spoon,
necessities for survival.
Here the orange are rising blocked
by a fence, a border, barbed wire.
The grass grows bare from optimism,
thinks 289-128, the convict.
Really, where is the marker between good and evil?
Or is it somewhere pressed between the pages of history?"
Three.
"Half-wet the cigarette half-lit a bugler rolled up outside
walking to chow--
a fine mist thin and neat and picturesque almost
halfway until rain implodes into baptismal for sinners
so think in un--
so think in uniform, COs lining the walkway.
The Residue Years on loan from cell 2
came this morning, the paperback version.
Brought characters like champ inside, a fool's dream,
or set up by subtraction, too many pleas, illegal searches,
guilty at the thought of life though
innocent as the mirrored-shaded bureaucrats
based on subject this American critique who chants,
who praise in pentameter."
Hidden in prim sail, the skies is changed,
but the broken man without a visit.
Dreaming family, he draws wife, kid,
dog in his head, time measures mathematics
that fail to reduce mandate to logic.
There are no empty skeletons on wheels,
limbs pulled apart by a team of horses.
The body is now instrument, but tonight, a book
may save his life time after time."
Four.
"The paperback entered through the slit.
Makes me want to holler "account time" after bag and baggage.
One night in the bar, all those images
rush back over laughter beneath a congregation
of drunken voices.
What did it mean walking with ghosts
unseen to the nakedness dark demands.
There is a scent lingering that will not leave.
Must stop.
The clinking inside won't stop.
Rottweilers jaw jacking uninterrupted
in the yard on Sunday.
A circumference around the track again
and one airplane fighting cumulus clouds
breaks free steel.
Chained to the past a corrective measure,
looking for salvation in books I once wrote.
Down these mean streets save the self and sunny
within the esophagus of justice about prison.
The protagonist returns.
Through a window, the sun set, a tragedy.
Having seen skylines etched in haze,
there are walls packed behind this freedom, yet undiscovered
but too real each day.
An electric fence surround, the net echoes,
metal rattling the long hours stretched,
either way subject to a condition of has a dagger
through the heart cannot kill."
Five.
"Anything can be destroyed for the non-believers.
Cupcakes was deflowered one night after count time.
Clearly this structure stands obsolete by legal order.
And I sit in darkness expected to evidence wrongs.
A witness to nothing on the stand, but in fine print,
forget guilt or innocence, but it cannot be forgotten,
a report from the inside, irony or ironical.
Writings on what plainly has been prescripted
as identical to the blueprint overlook
within the penal frame.
You can't see.
The backdraft's flashpoint or raging fire--
this suicide must be.
I must commit to killing the I in order to save myself.
There is no logical recourse.
Catty corner under the door, it arrives sometimes
one act staple at a time.
Short Eyes, the place lid on the cold cement.
From cell to cell, Miguel Pinero is perhaps the only one
who ever gave us us, our right.
Society flipped upside down.
Imagine that.
Color too this death as only a beginning in what you knew.
Come sit in the political madness alongside the bad.
Perception versus the real occurs quite quick.
Or of course it's real, recording human violation."