Even if you never read poetry, read this poem. It is as much a miracle as words can be.
We’ve published Jimmy’s work before. This poem is included in an anthology of his work, and that of three other poets, which came out earlier this year. It’s entitled Fired up with You!, edited by Will Inman and Robert Volbrecht, and is available from Will Inman, 2551 West Mossman Road, Tucson, Arizona 85706 for $3.80, including postage.
Jimmy writes that he is in prison in Arizona “for drugs, heroin in specific. We had a gun battle with the F.B.I. during a drug sale. It was a ridiculous affair. A G-man got shot. And the following morning the paper displayed, by a gang of Mormon editors, such a dramatic, one-sided story, the whole town rose up in hue and cry for the electric chair. It was quite a period of learning for me in so many aspects. The dream I had innocently, instinctively, trustfully held of Justice, melted in my hands like the most fierce man-eating fire. And thus, in the fire’s light, I took to contemplation on myself foremost, and this land secondly.
“But as I write, I feel very sorry for law enforcement people, judges, lawyers and so forth. Of course they live in luxury and I am happy for them. But what pain they must suffer by their befuddled minds — and to lead such lives, that not only degrade and destroy other countless human beings, but totally butchering ancient ideals of Love, Brotherhood, Justice, for crumbs of public opinion and a fatter check — its toll on the human spirit must be hellish. And I don’t stake their guilt out — no, their own skin-deep love of Justice is their accuser . . .”
I worked as a licensed plumber, had my own tools and truck, every morning met the sun, felt my muscles pull against each other, working the pipe-wrenches and shovels. I worked as a business executive for a merchandise firm, meeting customers, having coffee in cafes with prospective clients, feeling the sturdy handshakes, wearing my new white shirts and suits of different colors, driving automatic, power-steering chevvies, travelling to small communities, and I worked in Mexico as a rock-breaker, high on the mountain, stood in the midday sunlight, shirtless, my chest shimmering in perspiration, as I brought the big hammer down on huge rocks, cracking them, and my chest heaving, my legs apart, both hands gripped tight, and down again on the rock! And I worked for myself as a dope dealer of marijuana, sitting with friends on lawns, in living rooms, or by the sea, we’d sit and watch the sun going down, glistening over a thousand tiny swelling curls of water, exploding orange and yellow on the horizon, and I wondered about my life, where I wanted it to go, deciding what I wanted from life. And I worked as a woodchopper in the mountains, the snow was marvelous, glittering in the morning with the smell of wood everywhere, fresh wet bark, speckled with dew, and broken sticks oozing sap, tree boughs shaking with squirrels, deer on their pointing toes watched me from a distance eyes brimming with sparks. And I worked as a dishwasher, two big stainless steel sinks filled with tumultuous heaps of pans and skillets and chef-spoons, big-bellied pots with burned black bottoms, with sleeves rolled up and rubber apron on, I’d bend over, scrubbing as fast as I could, while waitresses zing’d back and forth, dumping pans and dishes, giving me a word of consolation—I’d grump, and they’d scurry away tired as myself. I worked as a streetsweeper in the early morning in my heavy old jacket and cap, pushing the broom, picking up papers, musing over the display windows of department stores, admiring women embarking on the bus, their thighs pressed smoothly against skirts, hair flowing, eyes jet dark and soft lips, while their hair shook, and winds sped rowdily down streets, against curtains of windows, against shiny hair of businessmen, their shoes spit polished to a gleam, briefcase in hand, and, soon, all the people jumbling across stoplights, cars and trucks sputtering in the early morning. And I worked as a cook and bouncer in a niteclub, cooking hamburgers and fish, carrying out drunks and breaking up fights, shooting pool with my friends as they choked on the food, and the drunks staggered back in, pushing cars late at night to get them started. And I worked as a milker in a big dairy farm, loving the cows, I’d walk down the old path to the fields with a stick in my hand, they’d all turn with groggy brown eyes, slowly swishing tails and chewing cuds, I’d give a whistle, they’d come to me, I’d follow them down the path, talking to them as they mosey’d on, and I’d tell them I loved them, their big wet noses. And I worked as a truckdriver in town at night, in the small cab, with just me, the radio, the stars, and the empty streets, and I’d stop by a residential house with a big garden and snip a few roses in the dark, then jump back in my truck and drive down to my woman’s house, tap on the glass pane, I’d hear her mother’s worried voice ask who would come to the window, and my woman would open the curtain, smile sleepily, and run to the door to let me in. And I worked as a metalworker on top of bridges, tying strips of metal bars together before they poured the cement, and at noon I’d have armwrestles with the carpenters, and eat chili sitting on dirt mounds, my whole body aching from work, yet I was proud, and I’d drive the big scrapers, and direct the man in the crane, and help carpenters, they’d invite me over to their trailers in the evening, and, finally, when the bridge was done, we all stood there, looking proud in our dirty and dust-smudged faces, and knew the bridge meant something to us all. I owned a chuckwagon filled with icy cokes and candy bars and hot sandwiches, I would go around to all the construction sites, and beep beep the gas horn, and out of the massive and rambling construction site, grubby workmen began appearing, out of windows, out of brick heaps and holes in the ground, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, laborers, all lining up, their tools and instruments jangling and knocking from heavy leather belts at their waists, the sun beating down fiercely. I’d give them cokes and candy, and we’d joke, while they squatted down and ate, smoked a cigarette, brushed dust from their faces and hair, talked about the buildings, blueprints, materials. And I worked as a school custodian, pushing the long dust-mop down the shiny scuffed halls, passing the numbered doors, cleaning desks, windows, scrubbing toilets and walls, watering the grass and watching the kids play basketball, I, the only person among all these books, blackboards and little figures of cut paper thumbtacked to boards, little gold and blue stars, and colored drawings on paper, as I swept up the dirt and carried my dustpan out, emptying trashcans— not only school, but the whole world, would be empty, empty without children, the most precious creatures of God, our hopes and loves. And I went on working at different jobs, as a chain-puller, a soda-jerk, a shoe salesman, refrigeration mechanic, gardener, horse trainer, appliance man, painter—I searched for an occupation where I could expend my full worth, I needed a job where I could be free and creative, and I kept searching, learning about people, about the country, while I looked for something to define my heart with the world into one, using my body and mind and soul, into one, and the search led me to my first cell in prison. I thought to myself, here is the ultimate test of survival, I have lost all I’ve known, and now, between these four walls, where a man can touch ceiling with his hand and extend both arms and touch both walls, here, then is the test of my heart, my soul, all that I am. And I died a little bit, my past life dissolved, drew into an empty pit in my heart, like rain water in potholes, and the world’s wheels splashed through it every minute, going somewhere, and leaving me, as if a hitchhiker on a distant road in the middle of nowhere, at night, alone, and all the faces I had known melted in the dark night, the sunsets and sunrises bleared pale, gone, all the voices, the laughter, words of workmen, their smells, the motion of their muscles, their deep understanding eyes, mornings, all gone, distilled in the horrible words of a judge and my sentence, all gone to just my face, to hands no longer feeling tools, or dirt and bread in toolboxes, to legs that no longer climb or walk long distances . . . no longer, but shortened to a five by nine cell, my whole life stuffed into this cell, no more working with machines or touching roots or petals, no more hearing the mad sputter of engines, no more seeing a woman’s eyes, no more children’s voices or their running back and forth, no more freeways packed with cars with thousands of faces freshly scrubbed and hair combed, no more arms holding other arms or people playing with each other in the parks, no more ladies in shorts with beautiful legs, or tall men and short men laughing genuinely, all wearing different clothes, bouncing on their toes, and the soft voices of their breast, or the roaring, no more, just silence in the middle of the night, as I look past the grilled bars, out over the barbed wire, and between the gun towers, I don’t feel dead, yet I know something has died in me, something dies this moment, and I asked in a whisper, What will you do now? I must connect life with my heart, I must bring it to me! I must reach across the walls with my soul and call loud out to life, out to people I love, out to life I dearly love—they cannot keep it from me! I hear in my heart lovers singing of life and love and sorrow, and there is still the voice within me, none can drown or take it away, and I follow the voice to its destination, along the way I pass my own death, my own dying, my voice roars inside for freedom! for love! for work! For survival, for a chance to be myself, to overcome, and to live! to live! to live myself! I looked long at the walls, at the bars, at the barbed wire, I looked long out over them to the distance and beyond, to the horizon, and knew I would die here, and must struggle like a child, to reknow myself, to relearn my heart, to live after I have died, to bring myself up from my knees, like a man who has never walked before, who is crippled in the face of great adversity, I must rise on hope alone, a small unknown man, a young man that loves songs and people’s kindness, though what I had been they took away, all of it, each particle, all torn from me and destroyed, away, gone, and I am left with myself, my heart, my soul, my mind—in complete shock, in utter frenzy of visions, in incalculable depths of desire, my whole person busted up, kicked and broken, folded up in a cloth of fire, its ashes floating out into oblivion, there was nothing . . . There was nothing, but to eat, sleep and live in this cell, a boisterous clamor of despair in my soul, shields and swords of new thoughts and new feelings, all unanswered, bursting and chanting the unfulfilled desires, all devastating this man. My cell was square, squareness effused from each corner, each particle of the cell’s existence, the plain bed of gray steel, the green walls, the steel cabinet, it was a cradle and a grave, to begin anew, to die so young, unmourned, uncelebrated except by me. All my life had been led among old and young trees, rocks, dirt roads and evening walks. Now between these four walls, Life, you must come from me, the shoes you admired in stores, the unfulfilled plans you carefully charted, the lovely ones you sought to kiss and love, must come from within you. my soul stung, became murky and heavy like wax, the grasslands within me rotted, the fullness disgorged, became gaunt as a web of stairwells, climbing, single soul, lovely and mournful one, haggard and blind, you climb O soul of mine! Yes, it was here in this cell, in the dry air, the bleached bone walls offering loneliness, the wretched sinews of my heart uncoiled despair from each grain of breath and blood, you straggled gray-whiskered soul of mine! A stallion and child at times, a tree, a rock, a sound, a house you become, in your own company, celebrating your own understood celebrations, festive and conceited for a leaf falling your way, Here within these walls, you become the world, mother to your flesh, father to your son, son to your father, all in one, you become! And traveled beyond the limits of thirst, suffered beyond the limits of anguish, a rampage of questions in your wake, heedless Challenger, Escorter of the void! Haltered by a secret wisdom of the seasons, plying at the sun, drilling deep within me, you sink, you sink, you sink, explorer beyond time! Losing touch with civilization, with what is right and wrong, with roads of ambition, with the term love, as you turned through the damp caves of your being, to find ungreen craters of your identity, to find your eyes like rocks among papers and books of bygone days, weeping with joy, shuddering claps of thunder in my veins, you stepped through each divine cavern, their blood-red roofs, their blue walls and wooden floors, air, water, dogs, supper, these elements drove like Springs across your eyes, grew from your touch, your desire, like late blossoms, fields rich and aplenty for the world you were, are, shall always be. Soul of mine, small or great is of your choice, but among the trees you came small, a child, among rocks and people’s laughter, the cooking of eggs, trucks and jeans, alfalfa fields in their blanket of greenish mist and musk, you came small and humble, sweeping across me, Gatherer of Sunlight, yourself, a massive heft of field in me! But among this clandestine house, bereft of human noise, that consigns life to a planet, on this alien and petrified phantom, a semblance of land and life so bleak, bleak to its core, each slice of life’s juicy meat tossed out, dry and infertile as cattle carcass gnawed by wolves on some destitute plain, here in this wilderness of injustice, where law is raw and savage, a ray of anguish through lonely hearts, multiplied is the hurt like gasping waves in a storm, that touches the unmoving rock of my wisdom, fitted to its own inclinations, its own reign under the thorned crown, elected by fate, unwilling to give up this pauper audience, I, my spirit, become aboriginal of the spirit world, kneeling on blood-blotched sand along the inner rims of my skull, blistered hot as a furnace, to sip the lakes of light as I traveled into oblivion, on a hunt for more oblivion, in the hope I would scale the secrets it held, secure them between my teeth, to withstand the pain of my loneliness, the amputation of worlds for other worlds, this world where I found my legs and arms were unloved, my limbs mere labor digits for my prosecutors. My heart and head pounded fiercely, neglected, confirmed as unfit, where each single pore and slab of muscle, each hair, my lips, my lashes, my fingers, toes, step— all became useless, unadmired, confined, ridiculed by these monsters of an unmerciful justice, all I was, erased in this rote-factory of human beings, to bare bristling marches on cold black mornings across the compound, to slave labor, to numbers, to dispensing with my name, a land without feeling, the eyes turned inward to a foiled black rose, and, outward, just the barb of its stem, through the pupil of each eye, arc’d, the splattering bits of fire as the welders within worked to close each crack of the cold soul. I, my soul, became a salt flat, white and barren, as my thoughts foamed saliva from their thirsty mouths, I became conquistador of all evil a man might want, I became death bereaving itself, all I had known, gone, glowing like a pile of coals, so glowing, my soul shaded itself from the heat, but my loss glowed like the evening sun, covering earth, leaving only my breathing and dark night ahead. Then came morning, daybreak, dawn, and fresh it was, and I like a hunter in a new forest filled with fowls and animals, stepped gently into my loveliest hour, it came for me, from me to me, a world, a life time, many life times, compressed into one hour of enlightenment, an insight of love fully supped by me, fashioned by me, to purge imprisonment; and so much more I hadn’t asked for, I received. What does it mean, this passage of time, blighted with furious contradictions, a flurry of flung dreams and expectant miracles, arguments on the stature and breadth of human beings, the droning intoning of something within ourselves, the persistent discharge of violence, raw like birth spreading over the continents, what does it mean? Are we competent warriors rampaging in masks of civilization? Raw justice is sweeter and closer to our souls than formal justice, when our feet take us, toll the bells of life, gentle tug of times past leap from earth, hallucinations of our ancestry call to us, from each point and form. The mortar of these callous walls, what fingers mixed it? From where was sand taken? From places where Indians made their fires, holy fires, where buffalos clouded the land, where trappers and pioneer families stepped, where newly freed slaves tramped, where holy dancers hummed on heated dust, and seeds were sown to bloom fresh fruit offered to passing beggars and Spanish kings, from this dust came life, came imprisonment and oppression, also . . . Someone knelt here a million years ago and let the sand sift through real fingers, and with thousands of years, came someone who thought of building a home, a town, perhaps a city, the best city in the world, and there was water, so precious and little, dampening dry lips of children, men and women, animals and fowls of all kinds, water that offered gold nuggets, water bemused by flowery mountains, water cutting rock supervised by winds, water obeying the root’s demands, water offering its share of life to us humans, our share of life. And faraway, or nearby, a million sparks generated by the clash of swords—subsided in the abundance of land, wheat and beans, cucumbers and apples, and came arid steel plows sweeping the rugged land to a smooth, polished and baffling prosperity. Our hands were heavy with goods and fruits— the inventions of the land contracted the earth to wood and water and land no longer pompous or regal, land no more of illusions, no more prayers, no more dances, but each hand an element till earth spastically shrivelled, and clothed the culture of the new man. Steel, sand, water, wood, how it all bears such fortune for us, how it all blossoms into cities and new miracles, how—I ask the steel, wood, water, sand—how is it you do not crumble in my hands when used for such evil purposes? I sit and wonder over your obstinate virtue, the wonder of your abilities to assist mankind, and yet, pasteurized by politics and ambitious bureaucrats, and yet they never patronized you as did sons and daughters of this land, now ages past—we submit to you our hearts and souls and blood again! but this time to be free of you— you have not changed, man has changed you and led us all to believe you are something you are not: to me, O Great Wall, you remain the sand my grandfather’s grandfather touched to determine the passage of the hunt, where deer and bison hoof’d, where moccasins and sandals flashed beads around fires in gold moonlight, where sunlight gleamed on sweating brows and burned rocks, O Great Wall, you have held the bones of my people! came winter, you clothed them in snow, came autumn you whistled on harps of wind and collected leaves; came spring, to those who survived you and your ways, you gave fruit and nuts, filled their shovels and loosened up their picks, sturdy for the trundling loads of goods, for the goats. You were sanctuary for the meditator, a vase for trees and crops, as sunlight licked your canyons like kettles of brewing lakes and melting snows, flying eagles. You, O Great Wall, are not my enemy! Here the men scrawl their last hopes on you, as did their fathers’ fathers’ fathers, journeying into unknown territory, as do their sons who come to prison, yearlings lost on barren rock, motherless, friendless men, whose enemies do not inhabit the rock but men’s rocky hearts, as time and more time and more time floods the steel entrails of this beast, as injustice flooded the land back then, and, like then, we somehow survive, we somehow survive. You are as you are, O Great Wall, hugging steel with your dry shoulders, kissing the keys of jailers, placing your immovable shoes of granite in my path, crossing my eyes with your steel mesh wire. I hibernate here like the invisible water of your composition, remembering the many ditches I swam on dry afternoons, the gladness and easiness of my arms as they moved to people—someday, when you fall and become dust again, the people that run their fingers through that dust, shall know my poem in their hearts and smile, as I did when I was free to dig and plant and walk, as I do now, in the heart and soul of mine. I work you, Great Wall, Great Great Wall! I work your parched and bitter face, your cracked and hard skull, your steely endurance I work with my pen in hand and heart, like a sledge hammer pounding away, pounding! pounding! with each desire of mine, silver toothed sickle swathing away the black brush of despair, with my dreams clamping into you, scratching out a beginning for me, as did my father who came upon you sleeping, unwilling to sprout crops for them until they gave enough sweat, gave enough blood defending you, though sons upon sons blistered their young hands, though you cracked beneath their shabby soles, as they dug deeper and deeper into you, against your will, finally to bring enough food to live, enough to let them live, with honor, as men and women, so it is with me, Great Wall. I have entered the cycle of life again, they built you up with toil and sweat, I break you down with my words, disintegrate you into the wilderness you are, for when I pace my cell, I pace on dust, when I feel you with my hand, I feel the strum of water, I see gold nuggets and flowers, scratches of those who passed through here. For my fathers to live according to the law of the land, they had to build you, enclose their folds of sheep and mark new black boundaries, and for me to live, I must crumble the walls, free if not any but myself from the fold of prisoners, reclaim my manhood, this is the only way, it is the circle of life, as cities fall and are built again by other hands, reworking what was wrong, so this is wrong and must fall. And from dust blessed by many hands, I retrieve their ancient dreams of a good life, a good future and healthy children, I make my tools—the written word against granite, to bloom the muse each morning, that lets me live, learn, and go on struggling, that is all I ask and all I expect of myself, for I am the wall of justice and refuse to crumble, I am the wall of love and can shelter you, I am with my woman who brings the next generations that shall dance to stars and roots yet to come, I am the wall that touches into deep heavens, forth to all sides of the earth, condensed it falls like water off my tongue, when I speak, when I move boulders from the path I wish to take.
