Hellven

A Texas summer will make a poet out of anyone. The Texas prison system will make poetry out of anything. Do you know how to handle discomfort with grace or do you fold up and call it misery? Do you know how to sit still? Do you know how to be alone with your thoughts? Shitty people will make their peers into poets. You belong here. You chose this life. One hundred and six identical felonious snowflakes per building. The heat will make them fall, melt them all. Poets every one. Survivors every one. Not a victim in the lot.A shitty person, yet, a saint every one. Having your emotions stunted will turn you into a poet. Hiding behind delusion, immaturity, ignorance, self-hate and shame molds you into a glistening poet of the highest order. Not being able to find a single waking moment of silence will forge you into a poet. Giving up, giving in and giving back may awaken some poetic tendencies. Draining blood from the blisters on your feet with soda can tabs will teach you to pray. The fear of Hepatitis and Staph helps the poetry flow. Patience. How many miserable bastards have learned the meaning? Who am I to say, judge, proclaim? I am a poet. Speculation will break you down, fool. Gossip poisons the well. Every word a carcinogen. Every statement a virus. Every phrase a disease. These poets, these merchants of death, carry out their duties easier than breathing and with the instincts of rattlesnakes. In the name of God. On God. Nothing precious and everything sacred. And there we are, the poets bring us the prophecy. If all of life is sacred, then none of it is sacred. If God is everything, then she is nothing as well. If you can take it all, you can leave it all. Either we’re all poets or none of us are poets.

Heaven and Hell,
ladies and gentlemen,
are the same place.

Welcome to Hellven.

Your enemies are having tea with your grandma. Your spouse’s lovers are feeding your aborted children in high chairs,your dead best friends are playing ping pong with the people who blew giant holes in your life and made your therapist a fine sailor, indeed. Hellven includes new feelings, which are all the feelings at once experienced in one completely unfamiliar way. Foreign. The new frontier. There is a bonfire made from the Tree of Knowledge, root and branch, and God herself is telling stories that predate Time and extend beyond the space outside the universe.

And she’s butt ass naked.

But we’ve been reduced and upgraded into celestial octopi. When we finally arrive to the promised land, our tremendous brains and spirits and souls are distributed throughout our Hellvenly bodies into a 3.0 ganglion. The only way we can understand God’s stories is feeling them in the space between the atoms in our glittering nervous systems. Pure ecstasy being soaked into an earthworm, a dolphin understanding the principles of quantum physics. We can only experience what God tells us deep in ourbones anyway. Even the ants know it. They won’t be amazed at the secrets revealed around the cosmological bonfire because they’ve known it all for hundreds of millions of Earth-time years.

A dozen men share one pair of shower slides with the willingness of family. We must because we can. A lifetime of my remorse, distilled into one scoop of macaroni salad.
Plop.
Ew.

A triple digit meditation on my sins
until that faraway star grants me mercy.

An old man’s mother died yesterday and he wept like a child.
He received sixty cents in food as a consolation prize.

It’s so hot we can’t think.
It’s so hot that we’re poets.

Yesterday, the thing I was most grateful for
was a breeze that lasted more than half the day.
Today the thing I was most grateful for was a tiny, used deodorant stick.

Poetry is everything.
These writings are nothing.

I’m in Rosharon, Texas.
And it is hot.

–

c. Summer 2022, Texas Department of Criminal Justice