When the wind howls, like a Belaz 75710

blasting through huts, wire fencing, padded jackets

you know there is snow coming

the fields will be white like heroin

and then you don’t need fences

there is nowhere to go, but the cathedral vastness of the mind
and the time it takes to walk a cell

to shower, and shit, and play games with the warders

like pretending to be killed, or that the world has not forgotten

that you are on hunger-strike, that you have been beaten-up

or sexually molested, or this is not now, but between the wars.
Where have all the great poets gone?

bargaining their meagre rations for scraps of thin paper

to write their poems on, hiding them behind broken masonry

in their cells, on the chicken farms, factory floors

until they rot unfound, unread
or memorizing each agonizing word, line, verse

in their food-starved, work-numb minds

until the first word, line, verse disintegrates

and disappears like salt waves falling back on a beach.
There are only the old women left Nadezhda

some have been here for years

neither kind nor cruel, but indifferent

to suffering borne or given,

oh, and young girls writing punk lyrics

to a man on a pale horse in Siberia.