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