House of the Soulless (pt 1)

Demetrius Buckley

Prison not prison but a cage upon cage
that if it all completes a spherical circle
we will become numb against your own peers,

collected, flooded with a mass membrane
of neurotic nerve. Call it the system, a cycle.

Call up Momma
with newfound symptoms common and unchecked. Wait
fairly for her not to remind you of what is lost,
the Texas number that dreams you up in late summer.

Get used to shouting down noisy halls, doors closing
every second.

Get used to being material bartered for swap and ship and
be like ‘and yet
to be handled with care,’ luxury you’re unfamiliar with. 

Missing yo’ mom’s dialect with mixed memories.
When sick say tummy ache 
instead of stomach hurt, tummy funny sounding 
when echoed into a cell above a napping bunkie
too tired to count his own layers.
How old were you when you came down?
When home, was this how you declared illness?

Your bunkie heats up a Ramen.
He lays a cold rag across your head.
The same head earlier years laid a gang rag.

Both times you were sick but loved by members equally. 
Both rags cold, colorful, connected. Now

shoes line under a gray footlocker, a cereal bag
holding other reusable bags. Try to remember
not to be wasteful: eulogy for unfinished food
that life's lessons are practiced on something as simple
as rations.

It's because, apparently, you're rotting. No bag 
big enough to preserve the content
of flesh knots ticking like jaws unlined.
Learn as much as you need, even all the dirty words
people claim in here: cumsucker. Butt pussy.
Shitstick. A shakedown
a sexual desire: correctional officer 
rubs one off. Don't touch me—

Consent to what isn't your right. Property, squat
and cough after you fill each hand with whichever cheek.
Become wicked and lose sight of your mind. Property
means mine, means you are the empty footlocker
for them to fill. You are someone else’s.  
The lining of death, coffee ring in a tumbler
before chow, and when no one is looking 
you lie close to your mesh laundry bag fresh out the dryer.
Hot. Easy when you work at its warm loops, 
to insert in its opening. Meanwhile

you stand at the bars lost over other hanging laundry
on the doors and wonder how they'd feel
between your ash aching thighs. It’s just property.
What does that make you, if not human?
You won the crowd by being original, doing everything
people do in prison? Though we do the same thing. 

A bunch of penguins 
huddled together on a winter yard.
A herd of bison in spring.
A flock of geese in summer.

House of the Soulless (pt 2) 

Demetrius Buckley

Don't answer the phone. It's Man-man 
calling from prison
with a mouth full of complaint. He wants to be transferred,
housed in a different unit. Needs money, needs

a talking to with a little scolding. His

daddy lasted a maximum security, warred through segregation 
a POW, an adolescent whitewashed
in romanticized blackness: drug dealer, pimp,
government discount called WIC, Trump
sugar daddy, Money Bag Joe,
the stimulus slut. Don't

answer them niggahs shouting on C-wing. It's 
the rocks in their mashed potatoes, a CO's heavy nuts 
that a cell shakedown bursts. 

The penal environment is reputable as elementary
with ABCs and colors out of line. Keep along the line.

Remember when uncle muscled his way through weights
until someone repeated his ways. Someone bigger?
Basically, someone will always try you.
Basically, be basic, an unnoticed block
of hem at an ankle. 

that low.

*

We turn units into societal number 2 contours. In sleep
we hold these prison walls with imagination,
the brick beyond brick freeing 
us like removing slabs one by one.
One by one we build another place
with four walls, skinned, captured
the self and called it the "I"

wake—

A convulsed-weep vibrates in a school building. 30 inmates
are studying circumstance. The martyred black soul
is an aviator controlled by privileged white women.

Water enemy, blood
mixing down a drain. Wake them. Wake them. 
A lung collapsed like a building least inspected.
The yard is in mayhem.
Their mouths are full of vengeance
too grand to fully pronounce.

Duffle bag over a prisoner's shoulder— call them
travelling men, kite pushers with a knack for hustling

They learn to mail themselves
by doubling synchronism.
They fold body as origami, an art form
practiced on reiterations.

Inside envelope
colored with prompts dog-eared—
corners we know too well,
how we remember the full statement of state
versus me. State me.
The me preconditioned by an electrical
umbilical cord.

Black armor tailored, sewn from belly
hardwired in TV commercials.

Honor is a spectator's eyelid.
When the eyes close it's the same when opened.

Chronological disorder diagnosed, notes written under
an alias because being me isn't fun anymore. This
isn't the first time I wasn't myself. My self
that I love, the selves that I lose mine's.
Pretend that I'm a salesman. Buy 
my love with currency, with currentlys,
with recurrences. 

I can make it happen, baby. The mind
is a terrible place in waste. Or is it 
a waste to have a terrible place in mind? Free
my company on a white shirt, misery 
ain't called back yet. A goddess
who prefers lowlifes. A little lower, mud 
dug deep, we dig imprisonment, bind it in hardcover
and call it reform. Redone.

How did prison fix you?
It didn't, the pipeline got clogged.

Tribes

Demetrius Buckley

For every surveillance, I walk profusely
to chow hall bebop—
I want them mashed potatoes,
Irish gang, Zulu cocoa Congo
Four Corner store four cells over,
enemy all over
—genuine saying:
I take care of mines
and mines 
is who I pass 
by,

so mourn, black
clothes 
in black
skin—
since 
black 
skin
since
war story sinew
over spear
and makeshift

shank
on forever surveillance.