The gavel hammered. The sentence tore my ear
and I went chained, degraded down these halls,
so terrified the letters jittered on the doors:
U.S. Marshal Detention Room; Court of Appeals.
What had I done wrong? The judge was marble.
The young girl witness laughed at all those years
I’d serve in isolation. The pillars smiled.
In my cell, I sobbed vengeance on their world.
That was years back, understand. The first fall
I had taken, the first hint girls might testify
against me all my life because I’m cowardly
and born infirm. And that was the first time
I began to understand my rage, the licensed anger
and resultant shame. Sentence after sentence
I went burning down these halls, flashbulbs
blinding as the prosecution evidence.
The renovation’s clearly underway. Today
girls ask me how I started writing. I read
the poems I wrote in jail. Warm applause.
Autographs. Interviews. The judge died lingering
in pain from cancer. That girl who laughed,
first trial, is teaching high school and she
didn’t know me when she said she loved my poems,
was using them in class to demonstrate how
worlds are put together, one fragment at a time.