Ace Boggess
Three Poems
Escape from a Prison Dream
Same walls around you,
no second awakening.
You’ve been interred,
no bell inside the casket.
How the living forgot you.
How you forget yourself,
so sick with righteous guilt
you push your body farther in:
cage inside another cage,
box within a box,
nesting doll of prison bars.
Does it help for me
to say the word ‘pardon’?
Promise release? If sleep
adds to your sentence,
when might suffering cease?
Can you forget the smell of bleach,
sounds of tromping feet on stone,
once they are no longer there
to remind you you are anywhere?
Awaiting Word
How do you fare having tripped the snare
that spins you aloft where I have been?
Tell me sun-sick stories of hiding from the shackle-mob,
blue destroyers erasing what you thought of as your future.
Do you have a case still pending?
Do your walls seem closer in the morning?
I’m listening. Whisper to me what you reserved.
Let there be freedom in flat, dread voice.
Hope served cold is unpalatable—we eat
to keep from starving in the wilderness or a box.
Speak a line that means something to you;
I’ll see its worth as a cricket sees the universe,
glorious to the nearest hedge. For what’s beyond,
I know that words can’t conjure it, & knowing, know
what’s incomprehensible is better shared:
prison cell, song in your head, the Infinite,
a course we set from one to the next,
crossing a shorter distance than you’d think.
Epistle
Unto the new prisoners, I say
be wise, wide-eyed, wary,
but warm as well, alive
in the death knell of your time at large.
Find the god that is music in your heart,
for no one harboring music can be evil—
bad, yes, & broken, blue beyond the blues you bellow.
Unto the new prisoners, I say
laugh with yourself about yourself
during delousing, squat & cough,
orders shouted by powerful others.
There must be a god of laughter,
also—invoke it though your beads
scatter like X’s on a calendar.
Unto the new prisoners, I swear
there will be times you forget where you are,
those blessed hours: the twilight of games,
a dream, a lucky breath exaggerated.
No government can sentence you
to despair unless you believe it,
aware there exists a religion for that, too.
Ace Boggess is author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited Press, 2018) and Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017), and two novels, including States of Mercy (Alien Buddha Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, RATTLE, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly and other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.