Some people there, who barely talked outside,

would ramble on for hours about Sue

or Laurie Jean, Lynette or dear old Mama.

I knew a fellow who talked all day long

about some Friday night five years before

when he’d gone drinking with his older brothers.

He sat there trying to remember it,

putting each scrap exactly in its place—

the car, the burger joint, the brand of beer.

And when no one would listen anymore,

he sat at dinner by himself and drew

street maps of his hometown on paper napkins,

carefully marking out the route they traveled.

Madness makes storytellers of us all.

I was no different. Think of it this way:

I lay there in my cell for seven years

and stared up at a window blank with sky,

day after day when nothing came in view.

My cell was littered with unfinished books.

The chaplain always complimented me

for reading, but he didn’t understand.

The stories didn’t matter anymore.

I grew to hate them. Writers lie too much.

They offer an escape which seems so real,

but when you’re finished, nothing ever changes.

The things I wanted couldn’t come from books.

I used to make up games to pass the time.

My favorite was called Roommates. I’d catch

a horsefly or a cockroach in a jar—

that would be roommate number one—and then

I’d look behind the toilet for a spider.

I’d drop him in the jar and see what happened.

I liked to watch the roommates get acquainted.

Know what I learned? That spiders always win.

At night I tried to keep myself from screaming.

I’d lie there listening to the toilets flush,

the bedposts scrape the floor, the yard dogs howl,

the guards who shuffled down the corridors,

the fellow in the next cell jerking off.

I had to think of something to keep sane,

and so I thought of her, of everything

she did for me, of everything she said.

I looked into my heart and heard a voice.

It told me what I must have known for years.

VII.

When they escape, most guys head straight for town,

steal anything they can, get drunk, get laid,

and then get caught. They don’t know what they want.

I knew exactly why I’d risked my neck.

I made it quite a distance before daybreak,

but, when the light came up, I started shaking.

I’d killed a guard the night before. I’d scaled

a barbwire fence that sliced up both my hands

and slithered through a slime-wet sewage pipe.

But I had planned that part back in my cell.

The thing I hadn’t counted on was sunlight—

the sun and open spaces … there were no walls!

I had forgotten what the world was like.

I started crying. Can you picture me

standing there stunned and squinting like a mole

someone had flushed out of the ground to kill?