I sweep dead crickets
out of my office.

They come inside,
making their way
under the fire door.

The door leads
to
A-Yard, a quick exit for me
if the alarm ever goes off for a
more legitimate reason than some
****-bird having a contraband
smoke in the john.

The crickets come in;
they find
slick concrete floors,
painted cinder block walls
and certain death.

They’ve got no *******
traction;
really, it could be called a false-start.

Perhaps, they laugh,
spitting their tobacco juice,
thinking how clever they are
to have escaped the late-summer
heat.

Once here,
they find that the hop
is hard to dance,
so they play their cricket-fiddle
and listen, thirstily
to the echoes of
their own songs
ringing out and dying slow,
here,
on the inside.

They do the same,
barely moving by the time
I arrive on the wing.

Circles, mostly.
One leg broken from trying too hard
in this environment,
hoping to hop away,
to escape into someplace better
than my uninviting
office space.

I have spoken of similar circles,
redundancies,
in this very room
that the crickets die in.

These men,
jump, hop, and bash
themselves into a submissive state
often before they even realize it’s
done.

Shattered,
squashed,
ultimately swept out of the office,
their broken lives written on the side
of a manila folder.

We try,
they and I,
to
sing in ways
using words
that echo louder
than the songs of those
crickets who choose
to die
in prison.

*

-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2020

I think I know
what’s happening,
after the fact.

The house is more or less closed up.

The TV room,
to the kitchen,
down the hallway,
the bathroom,
the bedroom.

Do it again and again,
world without end,
amen.

He keeps it hot.
His bones hurt
like the unused rooms
with their doors
shut.

The newspapers,
junk-mail on
the kitchen table.

We clear space
for coffee cups,
conversations.

It’s small,
but it’s a horde
nonetheless.

The result of boredom,
the fact that it’s not really
hurting anyone,
nobody complains.

Angela straightens things
up when we come over for a meal
now and then.

(She does the cooking.)

He’s lonely.
He wants to talk to someone.
Who?

No one really talks
his brand of talk
these days.

He’s still working on the book
that he started writing
when I was 16-years-old.

He leaves us alone
on the weekends, mostly.

We do our thing,
he does his.

During the week,
we feed him dinner
most nights.

It’s a good arrangement.
We talk a lot as Angie
cleans up afterward.

It’s alright.
It’s fine.

Cynthia still casts
shadows in the house
that I grew up in.

I wish she was home
with him.

He does too.

We all know it.

*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2020

I’ve been eating popcorn
out of my hat.

It was a freebie that I picked up
at the Gower town fair.

The hat advertises the
centennial anniversary of some local bank
that I’d not heard of until that day.

It was a hot day.
The sun was brutal,
trying to beat us down.

(Pops, the boys, & I.)

We’d walked the perimeter
of the park,
the town square,
in our efforts to see what was what.

We eventually settled on some
kettle corn,
a couple of BBQ
sandwiches apiece.

We’d brought
gas-station fountain drinks
with us;
sneaked ‘em right on in.

My sons found the rides
straightaway.

They spent about $20 of
mine and my own father’s
money.

They masked up,
were cautiously carefree;
stopping for squirts
of sanitizer between
swings, bounces, and bumps.

Pops and I
found a bench
away from everyone else.

I’d gotten him a hat too.

We used them to shield
our heads, our eyes
for the afternoon.

Today,
mine’s an impromptu,
improvised popcorn
bowl.

I’d lined it with a couple
of unfolded brown paper napkins
first;
proud of my ingenuity.

As I poured my first
cap full,
I could almost hear
my wife’s chiding
words.

I chuckled to myself
and

didn’t write them down.

I wrote these instead,
while I munched another
handful of popcorn
from my hat.

*
  
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2020

“Fear of Fear” was the title of that day’s coursework in “Criminal Thinking” Class. The class addresses thinking errors that these guys tend to make on the regular.  We, every one of us, have made these errors in our own lives too.  The material, written by human beings for human beings, has its flaws and its merits, like anything else.  So, the way that I go about teaching the class is to read through the material as it is, comment on the things that could have been addressed differently, then focus on the merit of the material and ask the guys to expound in either agreement or disagreement on said merits. The discussions can really take off from there. But, we always land the ship focusing on the merits that the guys can agree on and take our ah-ha moments, no matter how small, where we find them.

“I’m not afraid of anything”, he said.
“I just don’t have that in me anymore.”

We go on to talk about some scenarios that he’s dealt with in his not-so-long-ago criminal life.
He tells me that he has been sent on errands by people who were his overseers, out there on the streets. He tells me that on some of these errands, he has called his mother and advised that she should know that he loves her and that if she doesn’t hear from him again…

“Now, to be clear, I don’t like these situations”, he explains..
“I’m not afraid of them.”
“I just don’t like them.”

He goes on…

“Let me give you another example.
If my kid wants to go on a roller coaster, I’ll go.
I’m not afraid to get on the roller coaster, but I don’t like them.
I’m always thinking about the cars flying off of the track and crashing into the ground.”

“I’ll ride my Harley down the highway at over 100mph and not even give it a second thought.
Yet, a roller-coaster…
I don’t like ‘em, but I’ll get on one if my kid wants to go.
I’m not afraid.”

Now it’s my turn...

“Okay”.
“So, you’re contemplating the “what if’s”, right?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“And, when you’re out there on the highway, you’re too busy enjoying yourself to contemplate the ifs, yeah?”

“Right.”

“Riding on roller coasters causes some trepidation though.”

“Yeah.”

“You think about what might happen.”

“Yeah.”

“If you can avoid a roller coaster, you will.”

“Yeah.”

“Going on missions for the higher-ups causes some trepidation?
You call your mom, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Once you’re out of here, are you going on any more of these missions for the bosses?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Because you’re worried about what might happen?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s another word for trepidation?”


These  guys aren’t stupid.
They certainly aren’t cowards.
They just tend to think in ways that have led them down paths that might have been avoidable.
They are human beings that make mistakes and bad decisions, just like any one of us.

These guys are making me smarter.

-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2020

There are gladiolas,
black-eyed Susan
growing in wooden barrels
behind the chain-link, below the razor-wire.

The Powerhouse
they call it,
the building that houses
the generators, the boilers,
whatever else it takes to keep
these cinder-block cell-houses
warm, cool, or otherwise
habitable.

As I make my way up toward
the building I work in,
I pause to look at these blooms.

I must.

For it is in seeing them
that I may be seeing the
only beauty offered that day.

There is so little here
that is beautiful,
one might say.

The floors are scuffed,
the walls,
the paint, chipped away
or graffitied with pen-caps
or makeshift knives,
not looking for that space between a cell-mate's ribs
just then.

There is rust on the window sills,
on the bedposts bolted together,
bunkbeds for the bruiser or the bruised.

Still,
the gladiolas, those black-eyed Susan's
persistence in palpable,
as is the potential of every single
human being housed inside.

The perspective shifts.

There's beauty in that potential,
presented in the form of actualized,
engaged participation in today's classwork
or
small-group discussion.

'What's this?
A breakthrough?
Sir, is that a teardrop?'

Real,
not tattooed.

Beautiful.

More so than any gladiola
or
black-eyed Susan here
could hope for.

*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2020

What a luxury this is,
to **** indoors,
when what’s out there is so oppressive,
in so many ways.

Let us speak to one another
of our shadow-lived lives.
We’ll use words of romance,
reverence, street-toughened
prideful parlance.

We’ll speak openly, shamelessly
of ******* outside.

This phrase seems to be
the only applicable euphemism
for a life spent tripping over corpses,
seeing swarms of golden bees buzz by our brains,
the fatality of their sting
as yet unknown to us.

We’ll smoke awhile,
speaking of our children as well.
We’ll pretend that we give a ****
what their future holds, knowing all that needs to be
known happens in the immediate,
the now.

(The next score, the next hit, the next left-handed dollar,
the blood-blackened sky,
ruling
reigning,
******* outside.)

Still,
we speak sentences,
bits,
set-backs full of ‘do as I say, not as I do’,
fully expecting to protect everyone
but ourselves,
all the while continuing to
**** outside.

Finally,
we end up here;
the now here,
nowhere.

This place,
with it’s all-too-honest
hallways where we can lie
and deny that we did it to ourselves,
our children, our families.

We know,
that poverty and parenting
play their respective,
inter-generational roles.

Yet,
in the end,
each of us has at least a modicum of understanding
that there are alternatives
to the ineffective intellectual
toilet-bowl mentality
that keeps us
******* outside.

*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2020

We are made
of time and decisions.
It is not destiny
that guides us
nor
fate that stirs the winds
which fill our sails.
It is time,
alongside the very choices we make
which define us, create us.

Molecules, atoms, electrons.
Matter. Space dust. The very cosmos,
the time-space continuum.

Time.

We, our very selves
are the product of a singular
moment.
Even if that moment
is or was not as sweet
as we might wish it to be
or have been for ourselves
or  
those who put movement
and
momentum into our
very creation;
we
are
made
of
time.

Life,
once that particular
clock begins to tick,
is ultimately our own.

How we react to
what happens
along the way
is that which makes an individual’s life
what life is.

These are the terms and conditions.
These are the rules.
They’re always changing.

Eventually, time’s up.
Food.
We become food for worms.
Time moves on.
Without us.
The tree grows.
We feed it.
The sun rises and sets.
We don’t see it.
Time passes regardless,
heedless to our absence.

Would to doom.
Gone too soon.
No fork. No knife.
No spoon.

By light of the moon,
stillborn youth.
No more lies,
only truth.

Until
the end
of
time;
undecided.

*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2020