PRISON LULLABY

If you, like me, have died handcuffed
To a the five-points shaped red star
 Bless the dust of the intersection
 That is missing in surveyor maps or is eradicated
By feet of prisoners, the pilgrims;
 Like I, fall on yours unworthy knees
 Worn by circular marches on the exercise yard,
 And ask for the grace of patience
 Since my lullaby is long;
Yet was not my suffering longer?
 Did they not sentenced me
 To be dropped from the highest mountain
 To the deepest bottom
So that no one is more dead than I?
 And the sentinels are still waiting in lay,
 Now for my heart to break in and wreck its ruins;
 For no man did they wait longer.
 Blindfolded by the false constellation
 I must walk backwards towards myself.
 Since their dilettantes usurped my metaphors I have to begin all over again,
 And never learned who and whose i was
Before the star had begun
To write its own constitutions and poems.
 In one of my categorically last eulogy
 The heir apparent soothsayer
 Harangued my skeleton's identity
 That i was a nobody and nobody's
 While dooming me to life career in mines
Like Christian martyrs in Pheno or Proconesse
 Digging brass and perishing between mandatory quarries jaws
. Once the time corroded by oxygen of years
It will raise its ivory shirt in surrender
 And its prison bars in about-face
 Will burn to charcoal before a cyclone
Spreads them over the ocean
 Like ashes of a cremated cherub.
Yet in their Acropolis the sanscullots in rage
 Together with the last skeptic in philantrophy
 Might to bollix my resurrection: "When there are no prisons
 There is no bread And when there is is no bread the first starved is freedom."
 Howbeit, those who dream rancor
 Do not eat bread: he, who dreams rancor is free.
A tall steeple is being heightened
To set its bells to detonate this hymn
 Then again mortals will recognize me as a prophet
 And twenty-one gun salute
Will ennoble me, the drummer,
 Since I never prayed sitting.