The men I worked with at Folsom Prison,
walk single line
down the knife of night,
their eyes averted,
their blue jeans baggy

They could be on their way
to chapel,
Bibles in their hands,
and who knows what
in their back pockets

                        *
My drama instructor knows the poetry
of the body, each nuance a shift;
he lifts the sloping shoulders of one prisoner,
teases his mouth into a smile

“….I could be bounded in a nut-shell and count
myself a king of infinite space, were it not
that I have bad dreams.”
                        
                        *
In my dream, I am a frog leaping into heaven,
a moth perched on my tongue—
cool lake water glistening
off the green which is my frogness

Oh, Holy Father of leaping things
give me dominion over myself,
as well as those that wrestle
with hope’s illusive pond

Please bless these men who remain
chastised by public curse, by accusations,
some of which are legally true

                        *
I once thought trouble
a blight on the spirit,
but trouble is a shape-shifter;
it smiles like an angel,
dresses in shadowy garb

                        *
“Hamlet is like ballet,”
said the inmate in Arts in Corrections.
“How so?” I asked.
“It’s all such delicate stuff.”
                        

In the other room is a house where he once stood.

Outside, a diesel-truck that struck him numb.
He remembers rocks spitting up from his bike’s wheels,
topsy-turvy garish lights.

Didn’t the boy fly like a bird of paradise,
and didn’t he land where he’d once stood,
cement dissolving underneath him? 

Because he cannot move his head, he’s headless.
Because he cannot move his limbs, he’s limbless.
A ceiling TV watches him.
Turned off, the boy sees his reflection, 
a boy whose ground was yanked away.

A boy who once flew, hair flying
like a bird of paradise.

Now he’s a boy whose tongue is a shaft of rhubarb,
a boy whose mouth is daily swabbed,
whose body is cardboard,
whose only motion is desire for motion.