from RIVER STYX
& when my brother says Swann Rd. is the world, he ignores boarded vacants, broken windows - this place’s shattered glass? He tells me to believe the world is a tenement house, a pocket full of stones, a world of ghosts, & what’s left of ash & smoke after each inhale.
I visit him now that a prison cell holds his world.
Dead men circle every block we know, thread this world with quotes from psalms, “the sorrows of death embrace me,” “some trust in chariots and some in horses.” They embrace metaphor, disbelieve gravity, breathe in a haunted world.
& what of my brother? Running these streets, he was a horse — graceful, destined to be broken. Why admire horses?
Why compare everything fast and beautiful to horses?
My daddy’s generation had a saying for men lost in the world, it was true of my uncle, my cousin — men strung out on horse, men chasing the dragon, shivering with the memory of horse, that stallion gone postal in their veins — called them lost in place, stuck on the nod — with cities buried inside them — horses inside them stampeding. My brother put all his faith in horse,
& there is no map to find him now. He tells me he inhales the funk of men doing life sentences & knows he is in hell, knows that he is no better than the foul smelling dung of horses, that he has dug his own grave amongst bricks that embrace him. He is an exile, with only rusted iron bars & bricks bracing
his two hundred pounds. Who will admit this cage embraces him? His life taught me “history is written on the back of the horse” broken by the world. We all in prison now, we all bracing for a cell. I stare at this man, my kin mined by embracing night. Call this place a horsecollar, a way to redefine a world,
& watch how it cuts into skin, how the leather embraces all of our necks. Even as a visitor behind plate glass I brace myself for cuffs. This is not Swann Rd., this burden placed on me, these memories of courtrooms and^the places where bodies were found. & still, I want to stop and embrace my brother, to hold him close to me and pause to inhale the scent of prison, to tell him what I smell, what I inhale,
is still the body of a man. He says, “lil Bro my spirit is in hell.”
He say, “I know the whole story.” He’s lost in memories he embraces: the dope, the capers, the dice games. How can a man inhale so much violence and not change? I light my Newport, inhale.
Think on how his voice has changed. My man, now a feral horse wearing kick chains, unable to sleep, always on guard, inhaling the air for prey, as if he is still the predator, as if he can inhale death & keep on living. Death is the elephant in this world.
I imagine the other men here, all in a world of hurt, a world filled with a casket’s aftermath. How much grief can you inhale?
My brother tells me he prays at night, he wants to leave this place. Who blames him. But we know all his wild hours placed
him in this mural of blood on a stained glass. His hunger placed him in C-block, cell 21. He tells me it suffocates him, makes inhaling fresh air harder and harder to believe in. Nothing replaces time. “You okay in here,” I ask my dude. But he’s in a place that only he knows. When he walks away from me he embraces the kind of rage I fear. A man was killed near him, placed on a gurney and rushed down a sidewalk. Dead in a place where no one gives a fuck if you’re breathing. To be a horse galloping away is what I want for him, he wants horse trundling through his scarred veins. Prison has taken the place of freedom, even in his dreams. This is not a “world where none is lonely.” & I know, he is lost to the world,
& I know he believes this: “I shut my eyes and all the world is dead,” & I know that there is still a strip, a place that he believes is the world: Swann Rd., where he can inhale & be free. Sometimes his cuffs are on my wrists & I embrace the way they cut, as if I am the one domesticated, a broken horse.