Poet in the Box

		The Poet in the Box for Brandon We have a problem with Brandon, the assistant warden said. He's a poet. At the juvenile detention center demonic poetry fired Brandon's fist into the forehead of another inmate. Metaphor, that cackling spirit, drove him to flip another boy's cafeteria tray onto the floor. The staccato chorus rhyming in his head told him to spit and curse at enemies bigger by a hundred pounds. The gnawing in his rib cage was a craving for discipline. Repeatedly two guards shuffled him to the cell called the box, solitary confinement, masonry of silence fingered by hallucinating drifters, rebels awaiting execution, monks in prayer. Then we figured it out, the assistant warden said. He started fights so we'd throw him in solitary, where he could write. The box: There poetry was a grasshopper in the bowl of his hands, pencil chiseling letters across his notebook like the script of a pharaoh's deeds on pyramid walls; metaphor spilled from the light he trapped in his eyelids, lamps of incandescent words; rhyme harmonized through the voices of great-grandmothers and sharecropper bluesmen whenever sleep began to whistle in his breath. So the cold was a blanket to him. We fixed Brandon, the assistant warden said. We stopped punishing him. He knows that every violation means he stays here longer. Tonight there are poets who versify vacations in Tuscany, the villa on a hill, the light of morning; poets who stare at computer screens and imagine cockroach powder dissolved into the coffee of the committee that said no to tenure; poets who drain whiskey bottles and urinate on the shoes of their disciples; poets who cannot sleep as they contemplate the extinction of iambic pentameter; poets who watch the sky, waiting for a poem to plunge in a white streak through blackness. Brandon dreams of punishment, stealing the keys from a sleepy jailer to lock himself into the box, where he can hear the scratching of his pencil like fingernails on dungeon stone. from Alabanza: New & Selected Poems