Before he enters his cell, he strips
and hears a voice muttering,
Well, look how far you’ve come.
A shy, gruff person, he thinks,
I’m just killing time now.
Though at first he lives and breathes in the mode
of himself, soon he forgets the taste of his own lips.
He is just number 15,
on the 11th block, pressing his ear to the vent,
getting up on the gate to listen to fighting,
eating, moaning, and laboring.
I got to have my radio.
I got to keep my mouth shut,
my teeth unexposed.
I got to sleep sitting up.
Every morning, he has his me time
on the rusty bowl, at the steel sink, on the saggy mattress.
Gazing at smeared sky,
through a parapet hole above the catwalk,
he forgets the perdition of souls.
He is only a man who once loved number 46
(from the commissary), then number 73
(scrounging cigarettes), then number 44
(fair enough).
Scrubbing off the past that cannot be scrubbed off,
someone leaves the water running,
and Justice comes running with a clinking coil of keys.
No bare feet in the shower. Sleep, eat, shit
when they tell you. Touching only at the start
and end of visitor hour.
A fly dancing around his head believes
he is meat in a refrigerator locker, a fly
that doesn’t mind bare walls and recites
for the benefit of his senses:
“Am not I /
A fly like thee?”
Each hour takes small, slow steps, like a drummer
at a funeral. Doing push-ups, he mourns
the moments, like gondolas
dangling from a cable, that created him.
Am I mud or flesh?
Lying alone
under bright lamp lights, he hears, far off,
the sounds of the city still beckoning
and feels the airways in his chest tightening,
as his soul-animal huddles with others
in some final agglomeration.