Jail by Church and School

You too might find yourself

dragged from the dock by men

with plastic badges, someone’s blood drying

on your legs, a smile cut into your knee.

You too might be chained to a beam

in the main room with embezzlers

and frauds, still-stupored taro thieves,

the one Mormon practicing

in the corner with a broken sling-shot,

the infected and fevered addicts

who beat their women

but not to death. It’s a full lot tonight

and the guard nods from sleep

then lets the nearly sober go, the cripples

and quiet crazies, the almost dead

choking to breathe, the sad boys

who dream their fathers still pray

for them in the village, on the road,

when they stalk the shoreline

for sleeping fish. The radio plays

a creed in the melody of Amazing Grace.

In the two real cells with real bars

are rapists who fucked the wrong girls,

the high title daughters and pure-bloods,

the best-dressed girls from Guam.

In the cells are men who went too far

with their knives with white girls

they thought loved the foreign pain.

You too might shake their hands

and learn the truth of the turtle

and the low tide, matters of the heart

gone dark. There’s a story they tell

where they take you to the top

of a hill and make you kneel

and recite the sacred words

of the mountainside. You climb

a tree with a rope and jump

like you want nothing else

but to die in that holiness.

You too should imagine the echoed

grind, the sleepless lean, the long drop,

the flies and tree-rats filling

your mouth, eating your bones

to nothing.