I’ve been told it’s punishment, but from the divine?
Loosed from the bonds, all earthly ties
And what for, say, can’t I.
Lest I am the sinner, the adversary
No chains of such gall should bind me here
This concrete box where I count my breaths
Forward and back, on fingers and toes
The end of days on etches in the air.
As though it for pleasure, I-sadist returns
Congress of years from within burn
With nothing but that, no soul to confide
I will make up eyes to look—they judge!
Fictionalize mouths that speak—derision!
Bitter and arbitrary partners of mine,
And no tease of release, slamming
Through will, blood, shit, and piss
Only affixed a skin dressed in iron
I am weakly, free of that—least
Then something holds me close
My existence won’t fold in the unjust crease.
Six steps forward, six back, another six
To complete the burlesque of time’s progress
A harlequin, I am, flogging my back
Akin is the hope of some outer earth.
If nothing but pulp is beyond solip
Then fill my placid-skin with it
And disrupt my absorbing wavelength
I fear I am fiction as the words in my ear.
Glass frame of my skin, new days begin!
Even if I could share with these thoughts
Even if day would lithely walk in
Even if the force of death would invite me in
I would tumble, broken, blind by the box
Still within me
Leave n’er I, n’er I, it to me.
Am I ill, bleeding at the wishing well
No token, but holes, to bribe or to fill.
If I could just do as a man I knew of
From a source, I would doubt, skulking above
Who drilled, for escape, a hole in his head
Out from it poured, his greatest wish
In the language of the box—
I draw prophecy from the moan in the pipes
And these hands brought together in faithful decay
Trace licentious dawn and eve—a broken little slit
I know, I know of a sky—I hoped for it!
I’m strong in that face of patient nothing,
And I will win this fight!