Samples
DEATH ROW
He was an accidental package, thrown away
to float upon the surface of the world,
an obstacle, a mouth to feed,
the nuisance bastard of a rough man's wife,
a punching bag, a dog to kick,
a pale-skinned black boy good for nothing
but to shove aside, to mock,
to stare at with that hard and silent
slow-neck-turning straight-on stare
that sees so little and yet says so much.
An ordinary story his, the giddy highs off gasoline,
the Bull malt liquor and Wild Irish Rose,
the swift onrush from foster home to foster home,
group home to group, as though he traveled
down a glass-slick tunnel with the four harsh
winds of fate exploding at his back,
his panicked hands flung out to seize
whatever shone along the way--a box of donuts
and an apple pie, a winter coat, a pair of shoes
with solid soles, a pack of socks, a watch, some bikes--
until a handgun, loaned out of his grandma's purse
to a cat who called him cousin, friend,
slammed him, spread-eagled like a cartoon character,
against the tunnel's silver-badged,
blue-uniformed dead end.
And then the slave-like hobbles, lost-child mug shots,
and the prison label black, ignoring half his ancestry,
the stunned astonishment at what he had become.
And after that, beneath a high, shrill,
ever-burning light, the long slow dirge
of days and years toward the needle's fatal,
sympathetic slide into his arm.
AN INNOCENT IN THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD
Killers are easy to grasp. But this: death,
the whole of death, before life,
to hold it so softly, and not live in anger,
cannot be expressed. --Rainer Maria Rilke
You come to me from a nine by seven cell--
one thin-mattressed cot, one high narrow window,
sealed, one obstinate commode.
Your ability to bear is greater than mine
because you have been sorely tested.
What is it that sustains you? Hope?
Excess of being wells up in my heart.
And I weep--for the child in the womb
who has blossomed in a cage of darkness,
for the mother without breasts or arms,
for the unrepentant father hiding in the wings of your undoing,
for the future which is aftertaste,
and the death that will leave none of us alone.
Who has not sat, scared, before his heart's curtain?
One on each side of wired plexiglass,
we approached each other warily at first
across a vast and ignorant yearning.
Now we know each other well.
Although to the patroller, with his clanking keys
and dull observing eye, not a thing has changed.
Who has turned us around like this, so that
whatever we do, we always have the aspect
of one who leaves?
Misery still oozes through the walls
like sewage into a contaminated well,
and humming over everything like fear
is fear. And yet there is that oldest of old joys-
there is you telling me a joke,
there is me laughing.