LITMIR.BIZ

      Written the Day I Was to Begin a Residency at the Penitentiary of New Mexico

      Inmates put an acetylene torch to another inmate’s face,

      seared out his eyes.

      Others were tortured, lacerated with barbed wire,

      knifed, clobbered with lead pipes.

      I remember going to the state pen to see a performance of Beckett.

      I see two inmates play Hamm and Clov.

      Clov lifts weights all day,

      his biceps are huge.

      And Hamm, in a wheelchair with a bloody handkerchief,

      dark purple shades,

      is wheeled around and around

      in a circle in the gym:

      as guards watch, talk on walkie-talkies, slam doors,

      as a television crew tapes segments.

      I do not know whether these two inmates died or lived.

      But they are now the parts they played:

      locked in a scenario of bondage and desperate need,

      needing each other to define themselves.

      I tell myself to be open to all experience,

      to take what is ugly and find something nourishing in it:

      as penicillin may be found in green moldy bread,

      or as, in the morning, a child of the earth

      floating in a porcelain jar full of rainwater

      is something astonishing.

      But after the SWAT team has moved in and taken over

      the flotsam and jetsam of a prison,

      and the inmates are lined up and handcuffed to a chain-link fence,

      I figure their chances, without people caring,

      are “an ice cube’s chance in hell.”