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Incarceration

By Brandon Shimoda

There has to be a landscape
For wandering in place

For the nomad never leaves
The confines of the mind

———

Night. Siren sounds. A body is suffering
At the far end of the siren sounds
Close, a body being violated
Criminalized, running across the top of a fence
Leaping through the shadow of a chimney
Wind pushing smoke through the motherly
Spasm of the criminalized body
Sees? The criminalized body in the traumatized season
The motherly spasm watching through the decimation
Life     always has been    used to be
Impregnable, the criminalized body becoming an implement
To divine the pulse of violation
In-progress    not finished    incomplete

———

Spasms multiply in the shadows
The criminalized body around the edge of light
Spectacular, I say    the stars are dry
Feet are reptiles on the shingles
Blood on cactus is not murder
Yellow house is dirt
Caged in by a cyclone

———

The bashful branches of the river
First thing in the morning    the criminalized body is gone
Slipped through the rain    the criminalized body

The sun could not color

———

A helicopter
And women with dentures
Bullfrogs in the overgrown canal
Running below
The face of the prison

Flowing 300 feet beneath
Absorbed by the pigment of the desert
Beneath 300 feet 150 women
Halation of unleavened heart works

———

Perpetual rejection is comfort
Conversation in being
Rejected, revealing
Over time
Divisions    sheer yet temporary
Bodies suspended over the landscape    crosses at night
Appeal from a distance
To the rejects    to be growing
Hearts   neither sweats
Nor glows hungry for what is advertised    resurrected whole hospice
Into a tighter soul market
Opening if it can get us
Where we want

———

Hundreds of bodies address, by virtue of being inside
Turmoil, paralysis, self-protection, diversity
Each department separating from the street
To the border, the border touching it
Leave? What does not want me?
What does not want me, inspires me

———

My friends are strangers at 11 pm
Never have I been as close to them
As devil to their wolves    I call them

———

None
Are home, are in the streets
One went one way, the others another
The only way to be faithful to death, respectful to death, is to be
Obscure to death. Death is the one way. Living is the many
If living becomes one, as everyone wants to live one
Way in the guise of the many, death becomes redundant
Without faith and disrespectful