Release: The Charcoal Prisoner

You allow the hot stream in you
to tear open trash dams  
and pull blood
out of your clogged
and rubbery vessels —
emptying the blue highways that carry flow
back to the heart, the red arteries
carrying flow away from the heart.

Let it speak as it wishes, let the stream
attack and defend, define defilement
of what’s expected, chide the correct,
offer comfort to the addicted
and perpetually unjustly wronged.

This is how you learn
that what is permitted is also
somehow most forbidden in most places:
the undressed and messy view
of the charcoal body
of a prisoner newly released from fire,
the taste of that same fire in the words
once tangled and now unraveling
out of your head.

Let the stream pour from you
into the dirty streets, your blood
and delicious delirium
spreading and pooling,
staining everywhere as redly
as the insides are stained;

let it reveal the truth,
the large Truth
without compromise in image
or substance…let it show
what has been trapped inside you,
the charcoal prisoner’s body
that is now a gray covenant
between you and the jailors
that you’ll not shut up
at all, ever,
never stop accusing them
of negligent surrealism,
of imposing a small outside world
that imprisons the immense inside world
until no one can believe in it
or begin to understand it
without speaking, however poorly,
of how hot it is in there…