telling you the truth of what you long tried to hide.
Sept. 26, 1977
FROM
WHAT’S HAPPENING
WHAT’S HAPPENING
At this moment, fires of a riot are everywhere.
The men call into the smoke, We Want Justice!
Eyes blear from smoke.
In a cellblock the size of a moderate community church,
fifty, sixty fires are spewing everywhere.
My eyes are crying . . .
the water is turned off, the air conditioner off,
a sandwich for lunch, no breakfast, no supper,
the men scream, We Want Justice!
And this morning a Mexican is shot to death,
two weeks ago another Mexican was critically shot,
and the Black gangs are locked down,
the Chicanos and Whites are locked down,
and fires burn and burn before each cell,
voices scream and scream, We Want Justice!
The entire prison population quits working
in fields for three cents an hour,
in the factories for a dime an hour,
and fires engulf the tiers,
illuminate cell after cell
long deep eyes stare from.
Behind the flames and arms cloaked in smoke
is the cry, We Want Justice!
My cell fills with smoke, I can’t see anyone or breathe,
and six hundred men cry, We Want Justice!
The fire! The fire! And men cry out, Strike!
Viva La Huelga! La Huelga!
Music is playing above the flames, above the smoke,
and I am weeping with my hands over my face!
My cell fills with more smoke! I can’t see the bars!
The whole cellblock is a huge billow of smoke!
Over the floor sewage reeks ankle high! Urine and feces!
Everywhere, flooding, and the water is turned off,
garbage piled up for weeks catches flames high! High!
Smoke and more smoke and more smoke!
No one can see anymore, but hear the raging cries,
Viva La Huelga! We Want Justice!
Men are screaming in their cells, behind the bars,
behind the smoke, flames and weeping, Men . . .
we live like this . . . this is rehabilitation!
Grotesque Murderers! Ignorance! Waste and Blood!
Beatings! Robbery of Dignity! Sickness of Soul!
And through the smoke men’s voices call,
how you doing over there? You ok?
And some yell, play the song I like, I love!
Play the one about the man that lost his woman!
About the one that fights for his freedom!
Through the smoke! The fire! The Murderers! Play! Play!
Let my soul feel once more the shudder of those days!
When I was free and human! Let me hear it and weep!
And the songs play, and the men sing along,
old sad faces and voices alive in the fire,
in the smoke and bars in their cells, they sing!
From far away in the night, you can see the big cellblock,
a sparking mountain of rock, jutting up, higher
than the mainyard walls, up, with six hundred men in it,
you can see the square windows filled red with fire,
from the flues on top of the roof shoot sparkles,
sprouts gray smoke,
at the windows red against the night flames jump,
pouring flames through broken windows,
expelling black gray smoke,
in the night surrounded with blackness,
and inside in the fire and smoke,
in foot deep sewage, are the cries, We Want Justice!
Viva La Huelga!
And the weeping, and the hate, and the blood!
And the despair, and rehabilitation!
Inside this furnace are the men, human beings, voices crying,
screaming and eyes weeping!
Poor Whites, poor Blacks, poor Chicanos, poor Indians,
who yell, turn the water on!
Let us flush our toilets! Let us drink some water!
They bang against the bars, shuddering rows of steel cages!
They bang against steel bars with broomsticks!
In the midst of flames and music and blood,
in shit and grime and smoke and scars and new wounds,
they scream, turn the water on!
And I am weeping! I am sick!
I have had enough, and yet every day I go on,
while this poem is read aloud by someone,
I am going on, and the sky is filling with black smoke,
the windows are filled with flames,
and I weep! My eyes burn! My lungs are black with smoke!
I APPLIED FOR THE BOARD
. . . a flight of fancy and breath of fresh air
Is worth all the declines in the world.
It was funny though when I strode into the Board
And presented myself before the Council
With my shaggy-haired satchel, awiry
With ends of shoestrings and guitar strings
Holding it together, brimming with poems.
I was ready for my first grand, eloquent,
Booming reading of a few of my poems—
When the soft, surprised eyes
Of the chairman looked at me and said no.
And his two colleagues sitting on each side of him,
Peered at me through bluemetal eyes like rifle scopes,
And I like a deer in the forest heard the fresh,
Crisp twig break under my cautious feet,
As they surrounded me with quiet questions,
Closing in with grim sour looks, until I heard
The final shot burst from their mouths
That I had not made it, and felt the warm blood
Gush forth in my breast, partly from the wound,
And partly from the joy that it was over.
STEEL DOORS OF PRISON
The big compound gates close the world off,
Lock with a thunderous thud and clunk,
While bits of dust scatter into your lungs,
Breathing in the first stark glance
Of prison cell blocks behind the great wall,
Breathing in the emptiness, the darkness
As you walk with an easy step on the cold sidewalk.
Then another door locks behind you.
This door is your cell door. A set of bars,
Paint scraped, still as cobras in gray skins,
Wrapping around your heart little by little:
The ones you love cannot be touched,
Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day,
All seen from these bars, celebrated
With a deep laboring yearning within,
While the cobras slowly wind and choke
Your mind, your heart, your spirit,
You hear nothing but the steel jaws close,
Slowly swallowing you . . .
OVERCROWDING
The maintenance man was banging loudly
Fixing the mechanism above one of the cell doors.
Showers were sputtering out water on each tier,
TV and radio sounding deafeningly in a duel
All over the cavernous cellblocks extra loud,
The last of the cons just returning from supper
When the
y found Gary lying up on the tier,
With stab wounds too numerous to count,
“Looked like Swiss cheese,” one guard said.
I caught a glimpse of him . . .
Face covered with a sheet, one blood-spotted boot
Dangling out of the sheet,
One puffed and pale hand turning blue,
Being wheeled out on a stretcher.
The same night, clearly from my cell,
I could see a tremendous fire engulf a cell,
Flames lick upward ten, twenty feet in the air,
Bulging out from the cell,
Thrusting outward past the wire screen
That runs along the tier,
Flames gurgitating, throwing a yellow glow
Into the pitch black cellblock,
To the far end of the cellblock.
Last night a fellow picked up a steel pipe
And beat his cell mate with it.
The bludgeoned one appealed for help
With horrid fear-stricken jittery cries,
Screaming out for the guards for two hours,
Until finally one arrived from Arabia,
Glum eyelids and a sorry about that ole bud
But I was having my coffee.
Prison is a dead man’s zone.
Looking into the eyes of men here,
There is something more than cautiousness,
A sense of complete cold barren knowledge,
Of being abused too long and too far,
Coerced into indignities that pile up on them,
Into conditions that make them reckless and savage,
Watching the Directors of Prisons on TV
Fiddle with lies, sliding past the truth
That really exists here, the impending violence . . .
Turning around and around us daily
Like a gigantic snake slowly choking us,
Sinking its fangs as the poison seeps deep
Day to day in this Arena of Death,
Where hope seeps through the cracks of our dark skulls,
And lights go on to start another day,
As if nothing at all had happened last night.
AH RAIN!
Sweet scented, dripping from eaves and darkening
plastered walls.
Muggy air! Goblet heavy and dark goldfish
filled with rain!
In the forehead of my brow is thunder!
My heart orange-colored,
my body an orange grove dripping with rain
and pungent with acids and roots, dead leaves,
thunder! thunder! thunder! in my forehead
lighting my darkened grove, shook branches
and petal dripping and bough snapping,
soft earth I plunge seeds to like sword tips,
in the crackle of sky my soul is,
in the sweeping winds, I lift my head high,
expand my chest to breathe! breathe! breathe!
breathe in the wood and green leaves,
in the musty earth, the rotten compositions
that create in their rot such famished beauty,
sweet and thick with life, dunked heavy
in rain, to swirl in our mouths life, life, life.
Body that I am, bone hard, black handed babe,
heart that I am, crushed raging aflame timber,
soul that I am, a hard chicken-pen dirt,
rain seeds, spitting down seeds,
the sun claws like a morning rooster.
The rain, rain, the rain, I put my head down,
so humble before my master Rain,
I drench my body, shimmer, clothes wet,
my religion is Rain, my anger, hate, love is Rain
THE RUSTING SKY
And the red hours dripping from its mouth
into the belly of blackened cities.
A light haze circles the city, a bluish red
like inside a cathedral, where widows come to pray
for long dead husbands.
I play possum in my sleep after dinner.
I know all the time night is surrounding me, I can’t look.
Not until a human voice wakes me, or a cry from the street
calls me, or a door opens and I know a friend is in the house.
But to open my eyes only for the night? No no, it’s too strong.
So strong that all the shadows rising from
creaky buildings, and growing out of our hands and bodies,
so strong is night, that no shadow can protect me from its
brightness.
What brightness, you may ask? One that glasses
my soul, so to move would break it. A brightness that hurts
these eyes on distant childhood days.
And still darker the night grows. Only trees
survive the night. While cities smolder from after work tiredness,
and we are drowned in hot stuff of our hearts, and buttons
are loosened, straps unstrapped, and odors of our homes
smell like a wolves’ den, kindly the moon drops, calming
shapes and forces of our souls.
The night! the night! the night! The half
of me rising out of me, sinking into you like a leg, that
kicks up at the stars, and hangs lazily over the horizon,
as if into a river that none dare cross but the dead.
My life slows down at night, unwinds, taut
muscles of the mind let loose their grip on weights, dropped
in a dusty moll of dust at my boot heels. And the looseness
I become, filled with brightness now, like a bag of light
I punch at, that hangs from the sky! I am punched at by trees,
by winds, swaying and babbling thuds. And the night turns darker.
Until there is only night. And I know I am weak.
There are mascara’d gas stations in bright red signs and orange
eyelids blinking off and on. There are old houses withered up
like shriveled plants in their lots. There are dots of light
that nail the dark. The night spins with great revolutionaries
and hoodlums, with the loving and maddening.
Like a cyclone that’s come to rest in our hands,
that tomorrow will whirr out from our veins, and glaze our eyes
with a blistering veil. Yes, but tonight we tease it, for we
own it. It sleeps, this strange power that makes us who we
are. We slide from its presence sleeping at our feet like a cat,
or a small child, and out the door we go, or indoors we come,
with a different mind and heart.
And the night sleeps, darker it gets. But ever
calm, as though knowing our destinies, it sleeps, sealed
in a separate world; I almost touch, and can hear and feel
it almost.
I THINK OF LITTLE PEOPLE
Who tomorrow will be twenty-one, who now
fly on swings, kick at playground dust, and in cool sand
tunnel their tiny fingers to imagined dungeons and hidden
bedrooms in a forest, next to a pond, collared and coated
with flowers, shining bright its love.
The sneeze of bone-racked pipes amuse them
late at night. And cubby holes loom as large as caverns.
The grumbles of bricks, the squeak of stairs, all hold such
a castled cacophony, their tiny souls bloom, blossom out,
fr
om each creak, and grumble and sneeze.
This enchantment they tuck in twenty folds
like a special coin, laid in cloth. And they take the one
remaining year, and slash through the jungled field,
slowly, clearing a plot, cutting their fingers, aching their bones,
looking to the sky, and to the eyes of a woman or man.
Small humble children now in the playground,
on the merry-go-round,
on the grass,
and beneath trees by the ditch, where water runs,
in your caps and different shirts,
your messy hair and great great cries:
any of you, it’s told, could lead the world
to be a better world.
I come here then, and stand awhile, looking on, to learn from you.
Your mothers and fathers lounge tiredly on grass.
And they are beautiful, the men outstretched
on the grass, and the women glancing time to time,
to the children, and beyond to something beyond.
Cars circle the park, small birds in trees
turn a quick brown eye down to their noisy radios.
The shade has a mossy velvetness here,
across the carpet of green bright grass.
Ah, children children children, I love you so much.
And to you grown-ups in this semi-garden, to you
the holy fire of this poem is intended, to bring again
that coin into the light, upon our palms,
If only for a moment, then replace it in the folds ourselves are,
and relax upon the grass, shade passing your faces,
and then sunlight
FROM
ROCKBOOK 3
WE PRISONERS
With keys in our hearts,
keys so worn and rubbed,
waiting for a hand
to open those empty rooms.
MY HEART
A hungry river basin,
at the wind’s edge,
my desires sleep
like hot sunstones,
until the rain
awakes them.
YOUR LETTER SLIPS THROUGH
THE OPENING IN MY HEART
Pressing the darkness out,
like a sudden lamp in a room,
diffusing the walls and pictures,
Singing at the Gates Page 5