In Solitary

1. SAMIZDAT*

 Writer’s craft: manacled to conviction 

           like any zek to his sentence, 

            like a blatnoi to a pen

: assaults its own position 

: like a gaybist missionary, assassinates its friends

  

: like any other virgin –

just another bloody period, 

and another conception ends.

2.  YOUR BODY TELLS THE HIGHWAYMAN

If prose is just a page running across your face, 

poetry is the line lying between your thighs.
 

Your body tells the highwayman’s short story life:

The drama of poems at the point of conception, 

but just one more hackneyed form in execution.

3.      LIFE/SENTENCE
 key in the cake –

(in music, truth hid?)

  

oh,

the poet’s prison is 

the rhythm of his

poem 

                        starved, 

                        scarred – 

he makes his

  

break

--Duane Vorhees 

 *inspired by Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago