Prison Without Walls


The waves coming at me,
skulking along, a gloomy tide.
Black-grey-greasy surf
like an oil-rich sludge or concrete.
Mindless stumbling momentum
closer and closer
and I am incarcerated
in a prison without walls.

You're on the fast track
out of here with passports
in assumed identities
and a pocketful of bloodmoney.
Cash hard and cold
as the packed earth of graves
pummelled by weather
that presses the mud closer and closer
to the infinite prison
more desireable at times, to this one.

I told you to leave me behind.
I won't make it,
won't drag you down too.
I wanted you to run,
corrupted in wanting to see
your soul sovereign in safety.
Like wanting to see the Sun
after being forgotten by the cellar,
obsessed with darkness.

And you running.
For life, for your fate
fleeing my condemnation.
I still seethe with the hatreds and self pity
that bite like
slovenly, dripping
gnashing, spraying
teeth cutting through their own jaws
broken razorblades spawned endenticate
and mocking.

I reached for your back
even as I praised your evasion.
And I'm eaten by those teeth too.
Picked and slashed and cast into
a prison without walls.
Flung down to that goddamned hole
with transcendant loathing.
A broken shell of a whisper
fatally delicate to scarcely acknowledge.
An idea like temptation personified.
Staring at it with the shifty downcast peek
of the dominated, the beaten.
This prison without walls
conquors me unequalled,
a paradigm of subjugation
staking its claim over
the slain kingdom of bondage.

I'll imagine you
cut loose from doom
and breathing beautiful air,
relief staggering you into closure forever,
transformed unaffected.
Your hair in a breeze of fortune triumphant.
You'll have forgotten me by now, by then.
My design inconcievable
to have concluded any different.
That's what I'll tell myself.
And thinking about you in stolen instances
because punishment here is unrelaxing.
This prison without walls
demands unfailing worship.
Forced to swallow
rusted waves and standing
burried to the neck
in sand stained with the pollution
of all my previous collapsing exsitences.
Tasting bitter essence
and corrupted salt and steel filings from
old armour I thought would last.
Chemical residue
of times long degraded.
Events encoded, malicious and starved
for pain and rehash browned.

This prison without walls
knows know bounds to hunger.
A propensity for stupidity and suffering
you wouldn't believe.
Misanthropical venom, lust.
Wit that can creep
and pride that licks the dust.