higher crimes and misdemeanors,
the accusations are long and detailed
just like the poems I write

the sentencing, sneeringly sententious and luridly sensational,
your vocabulary confiscated
and imposed upon you a concision (ouch)
write only poetic-succinctly

when I cried out from the dock,
“innocent!
the words own me, not I them,”
the words, my jurors, snickered,
the fix was in,
and the sentence of hard labor,
a bad rap time indeterminate,
spent in a cruel and unusual
panopticon,
a punishment to fit the crime


no, won’t tell you what it means,

a private verbalist’s hell