When You Begin to Look Inside..!

You walk into the jail, the handcuffs
sticky, palms open, hands out stretched
pulling toward the earth. The holding
cell is long, sweat and piss and vomit
and anger. The holding pen is longer,
no mattress and daytime television,
empty as their faces. The transfer
upstairs. Door within door sealed by
voiced box, held by the Walkie Talkie
and jangling keys with the banana
yellow taser always close. On your
way up to the seventh floor, you see
a man whose head is twice as large
as it should, bleeding, surrounded
by uniform watching, watching, watches.
You draw the wall to wall to walls inside
your lips to keep the secret they already
know within. How many ghosts of orange
hovering below above in between the
floors? The beige cell block looks and clicks
nothing like you: this is normal appeal:
a hermetically sealed vacuum where
the roaches and ants lock their meaty
tongues on each other’s eyes. After
several weeks, you begin to starve.

You anticipate being let out to graze
in the common, then want back in
because charges, charges, charges
catching, catching, caught. The
irresponsibility of no eyes. The
contempt of ribs through skin.
After awhile, you start to absorb
the walls. The beginning to accumulate
the never endings moment that always was
and will be into your mouth, your spine,
your navel. You stop speaking in the
general sense of making sound. You
wait like a rock inching toward the ocean.
You continue gathering seconds as
shadows to wear on your back, the warmth
of suffering, running up the endless boiling
sand hill, the distance slipping across the
horizontal view of breaking in two. The public
defenders come and smile. Days of legshackles,
days and days of lockdown as the block fills
to excess, the water stops running, you dream
of the three stream lukewarm shower, you
dream of becoming the trees outside who
move with beleaguered grace and the freedom
of winds. They move you to new cells. The peeps
of light from the court remind you of the air smell.
The masses of men huddled over oatmeal,
staring at each other.

My lips becoming the black sea.
My fingernails the bitter length of meditations.
My hair as lion, as cauterized flesh.

You are within myself, bleating your sweat
as the stale oxygen rushes in through the
vents. You are remembering how it was to
be human the without steeple to see the
carrying own plank to neither shore the sea
inside the door. The door that opens that took
the moments you’ve inhaled long and drawn.
You moments you will remember projecting
your untimely reflection outside the room that
contracts and expands as your breath becomes
the bend in time, the bucket of water into which
your face slips.