"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
Comments on this blog are moderated. Anonymous comments will not be accepted. Please include your full name and a valid email address. Comments that fail to engage respectfully with the arguments on this blog, or create a hostile environment for other participants, will be deleted, and their authors may be blocked from the site.
According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
My pen pal "Conway", who is serving 25-to-life in California for receiving stolen goods, returns this month with two striking new poems. He writes that "Meditation Room" was composed during a recent stretch in solitary confinement.
Chill
Prisoners of lost sands swing upon a string of pearls becoming strands. Remnants of time; Like: Cheap laundry, strung up on the line; Tethered to chafe in the weather...
The Sun has blinked His suspicious eye once again-- darkness falls on all...
That heavy piss-stained kiss was unable to fend off the wind's bite and its whistle, cold embrace, greedy fingers frostier than jealousy...
While mountains drift away from these windblown years our sandbottles treasure contains an epic measure...
In this moment that last breath or, first draft inhaled when time accelled before you and I laughed then a cry expelled...
In this noiseless silence that could wake concrete the quiet was complete it would take only a whisper to break this spell; But me I'd like to yell...
****
Meditation Room -Yoga 101-
There's no place like-- Ohmmmmm... Here, in the meditation Rooms we are on our-- Ohnnnnn...
Relax, set aside your thoughts for a moment adjust to the surrounding sounds. The breeze flows over your body at an abnormal velocity, all day all night, it whispers, with the same exacting force.
Let this sound comfort your mind it will not change-- it is there to fill your Lungs desire. Now, tune into the jingling bell notes of brass keys, chains on hips as they Rhythmically flow into your vibrating eardrums then calmly fade away (isn't this serene)
Think warm happy thoughts, as the cold Concrete walls, caress your sense of claustrophobia. No need to panic, it will do no-good you're not imagining this paranoia you are Dead-locked inside, from the outside.
There is No-way that you can open the thick solid steel doors. Even in your wildest of dreams. So, maintain my fellow prisoners; Embrace your incarceration. Enjoy the solitude of this tomb inside your Meditation Room. Ohmmmmm...
9/25/2008 9:48 PMSteve wrote:
As usual, I'm blown away by some of Conway's images, and the thought of where and how these were composed. I'm grateful that you are an audience for him, and that you them project his work out to the rest of us. Does he know of this? I assume you've told him, and possibly shared the comments?
Meditation Room -Yoga 101- has a lot going on... I am delighted with the craftsmanship. I wonder what it would be like to read it if you did NOT know it was composed in solitary. Would there appear to be more metaphors (instead of realities transcending, in the mind of the poet, into metaphors)? OR are the metaphors so concrete that anyone would guess they'd been written sealed up in steel and stone?
I regret he's there, but not what he's creating from it. He's building powerful things from his pain. This is another way we are made in God's image. Reply to this
Thanks for your positive response! I'll pass it on to him in my next letter, and I know it will give him a lot of encouragement. He is glad to have his work published on the blog, and only asked that it appear under a pseudonym because the prison staff can be vindictive. We are seeking a publisher for his chapbook, in fact, and I am puzzling over an appropriate way to include his personal history in the manuscript without violating the anonymity rules that most contests have. While the best of his work does stand alone, the context does seem like an important element of appreciating the poem. Reply to this
5/4/2011 6:05 PM
Patricia Henry wrote:
I would like to help to get my brothers poetry & works published besides getting working with him on a for concept of dolls ( with story books ) Reply to this
