“What If I Don’t Want to Leave Next Year?”

Ace Boggess

Hubert Robert’s self-portrait as an inmate at Saint-Lazare prison (1794). Source: Financial Times

                                     [question asked by Savannah Dudley]  

Comes a point for all of us
when living in prison
begins to feel like living,
like a couple years at college
or wearing suits &
carrying a briefcase to the office. 

We adapt to circumstance
like caged pets
sensing our mind-clocks move
toward the coming meal.  

You won’t want to leave, 

but you will want to leave,
smoke thin cigarettes
behind a local restaurant,
order takeout,
chase strangers through corridors
of romantic obsession. 

The outside world is as harsh
as when you left it; it won’t
be as forgiving, but
full of colors, sounds, scents
stone walls have robbed you of.
You will hear a song 

on a faraway radio &
wonder what it means:
a moment of discovery—
to be a child again,  

to be a child
when every new experience
is god-touched,
awe-mad,
leading you into a new life,
a life like this,
like nothing else.

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press). His poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, Harvard Review, River Styx, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia. @AceBoggess