Poems
Polar Bear
The warders drag you off, then life dissolves
to mists of butterflying in and out of druggy dreams,
framed by rumbling slams of roller doors in vans,
until you surface here, and wish you hadn’t.
The days in hell are longer than the nights
are longer than the days. Eternity plods on
in steel and rough cement, guards jangle up and down
the corridors years pass snow falls.
No trials, no judges, no appeals.
Despair drops in at night while sanity’s off-shift,
lops one or two at random,
never those who ask.
My pelt’s a rotten yellow
from sleeping every night on filthy stone.
Just tell me what I did tell me
what I did.
Published in To Make Us Real: Winning Poems from the Winchester Prize Anthology, 2024