"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
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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 under California's "three-strikes" law for receiving stolen goods, has sent me an abundance of exciting new poems this month, some of which I share below. He has also been writing dark-humored stories about prison life, which I have encouraged him to submit to the PEN Prison Writers contest. If my readers know of other publication opportunities for incarcerated writers, please leave me a comment below.
The Door Miser
Sleeping ice walked the pregnant rain with mud. Lighting barbed steeples dragged shattered guitar strings while a Horn bled my breath... Clay eyes, blunt lips growling voices that died howling like the wind in search of Ozone... Chase this dim-witted drunkenness overcome by the ages locked inside an hourglass when a spider webs knots yanked the darkness out from under freeform footsteps... Breaking down again in the voice of bruises. But they never belched like: an Orphans sin in the way-layed wilderness or a maniac on the freeway speeding through stopped traffic at Rush hour... This interminable Toilet of a sacred food stop right between you and I inside this Homeless broken sky, or doomed door of denial... Glass days visions just offer an Iron failure while tears lonely language can only desire the world... Think hard about testing a terrified dictation. Arresting these wheels for too many years as even the moon considers my prison while shivering... When the Door miser crawls up my spine again, to suck on my nerves...
****
Poker After Dark
The Blood & Tears of life fell, into the ashes burned when remains of my father were turned to mud in a day
Kabashed his world into an ashtray then washed that mother fucker away lost, corroding through the pain bereft and rusting in the rain
on the wrong side of right from six feet under this grass left to wonderful blunders while sucked inside a riptide
the absence of fear in here, does not prove courage or discourage the deer caught in the headlights
when a deck is shuffled those cards are dealt, but it's how you play the cut or gamble on, a "Supposed" losing hand...
****
Gag Order
How do I make my tongue tell it? Choking in this bitter dungeon now, can you smell it?
Desperately desiring to describe
a moment to share
gagging like a dog in a fight
(mouth full of hair)
Boundaries eternal, are forced inward further in strife constricting our death out of breath for life
