Dear Hard Rock

after Etheridge Knight

WORD is they cut out your mind and tossed it,
I imagine, into a pale of bloody gauze. The shit
you never took, now splatters past your cracked
skull. You sit like a rock at the bottom of a pool,
placid, pallid eyes, with nothing on your mind, maybe
grasping to remember.

Your stories still live in that prison. Your crazy made you
mythic. The WORD stings like a hornet in my throat
while you smile. Everyone admired your mind. You’ve lost
it. I know that those electric shocks felt like falling,
and how after, with the nausea, even the empty azure sky
seemed to be saying something that you aught to comprehend.
It is called, “Blue.”

They clipped your intellect with a cocktail and a razor.
They made you impotent. Now you sit silly as a stargazer,
head in a blanket, seeing pin pricks of light. The WORD is a dog
caught you first. Did you kill it? After 67 days in The Hole,
you came out still so mad, mad enough for the asylum.
After another vicious crush, you came out swinging.

Still you have the courage I try to find sometimes, fearless
of repercussions. At the mercy of the Screws, why
wouldn’t you submit? What terrible transgression
tossed your potential? Was the screw who barked just doing
his job? When I went into madhouses, nobody called me
criminal. The pious play for God, constructing hell traps.
They fear the fearless. They want a fix. They say:
“Accept this punishment.”

The eerie blankness in your eyes says, No. Those
knot hole pupils say you need no help. You’re carefree.
And I go mad too. I feel like a hooligan who might
just end up in your same position. Stony. With
you, mulling over my name too, what I am and why,
at the bottom of the pool, inaccessible, where all
the voices get muddled, we might stare right past each
other for three minutes, hopeless, mumbling dumbly,
nothing between our minds.