Don’t Call It a House
By Fernando Rivas
It’s not a house.
It’s a box.
Some have bars.
Some are cinderblock, steel and glass.
It’s not a house.
Don’t call it a house.
Don’t call it YOUR house.
It’s not yours.
Don’t parrot the military double-speak of the guards.
You are not part of any military unit.
There is no war.
Or actually there is a war.
Here is the outcome:
Criminal Legal System: 2.5 milion.
You: 0.
You are boxed up.
You are signed, sealed, delivered.
You are a package in storage
in deep freeze.
Don’t call it a house.
Every time you call it a house
Every time you tell your inmate friends to come to
YOUR house
you are surrendering to the injustice.
You are using THEIR language.
When the guard asks where you live
you need to reply
I live in my head.
When they ask where are you going
you need to reply
I’m not going anywhere. I’m in prison.
Prison is not a house.
It is not YOUR house.
It is not where you live.
Unless you call prison living
if you’ve already surrendered.
There is no BIG house.
There is no SMALL house.
There are different sized prisons
for different purposes
all meant to contain people
to render them useless
and turn them into packages.
Don’t speak their lingo
Don’t excuse their job.
They are in the business of misery
and they chose to be there.
You did not choose to be there.
You are a PRISONER.
This is not YOUR HOUSE.
It is a PRISON.
There is no war.
The only casualty is YOU.
Don’t
call
it
a
house.
Old Man Tears
By Fernando Rivas
No one cares for an old man’s tears
as the world moves on
dead Hollywood stars and rock and roll icons,
tears cried in silence where no one sees
and no one cares to know
coming to the hard truth
that life is not circular
but terminal.
For a life once full
a time now gone
the years spooled out and spent
all of it coming to an end
silent tears are spilled that no one sees
no one wants to see
that all will end there
that all that now lives
will live no more.
That we never know what it’s for.
That we never knew what it was about
while we were about it.
All that time
All those years
and what’s left:
a piss-poor pool of sad memories
of what was or what could have been
but wasn’t.
We lived in the splendor of innocence
in the blind stupor of youth
suspecting the day might come
but it was yet so distant
now an old man’s tears is all there is
the memory of a kiss
or sunlight on the water
it seems unfair
but no one cares.
And no one dares to really see
the old man’s tears that soon could be
a misty dew in their own eyes
but live through lies that keep
the dark of night away
the dark of sight
the blur of life
that beckons memory
only to disappoint
to draw the tears
in an old man’s eyes.
Those white haired crones in rocking chairs
are only shadows, echoes of despair
that once were young and full of life
that now just wait their time to go
that sometimes may rise to dance
an awkward version of what was once
but sink again into silent slumps
where no one sees and no one cares
and shed their tears for what is lost.
No
no one cares for an old man’s tears
a quiet trickle, not a flow
choked back with pride so’s not to show
that all is lost
that all is lost
the past is nothing
just memory’s ghost.
Last Lost Echos
By Fernando Rivas
__1. Game Show
Inmates watch raptly
The Price Is Right
TV cameras zoom in and out
a crazed audience
contestants bouncing with
the excitement of
brand spanking shiny new SUVs
gleaming under stage lights
swept in the skirt-flourish of some
young woman traipsing
and gesturing in half circles
around it.
There are also
AI controlled microwaves
trips to Hawaii
other high-priced
commodities.
Outsized emotional manifestations
from the contestants
a kind of capitalist nirvana
where low income types
are taunted with possessions
the wealthy find trivial,
and these inmates
these LOSERS
watch raptly.
Do they wish it was them on screen
guessing prices
competing for that bottle green behemoth
of a vehicle they may wait decades to drive if at all?
Do they know they are even further down
the social scale than those hopping idiots
who only thirst for the few minutes of attention
and success
in their otherwise colorless, eventless and fruitless
lives?
The TV screen is an altar
and the inmates worship at it
daily
daze-eyed
at lives lived elsewhere
unaware of their own
broken
stolen
lives.
They are paying The Price.
__2, The Rec Yard/The World
Playing or exercising they forget
about the fences
the bladed wire
gleeful voices
shouts
the thud of feet padding on the dirt track
chords strumming on guitars
bright hot Texas sun
out of the unit and the cell.
Time measured in segments that break up the day
outside – inside
when I was ‘in the world’
I hear some inmate say,
you are in the world
I say to myself
this squared-off cut in the landscape
this playground
is a piece of it
and a piece of you
will always be here
even after you’re gone
an echo
a lost progression of hours
never now always
carried like the taste of bitter fruit.
Faces I will never see again
etched in these ghostly moments
to be rehashed later
in another place
equally disconnected.
We all live a small piece of time
a few laps around the rec yard track
and beyond that fence is nothing
essentially different.
The world
is this
and whatever else
you’ve seen of it
and it will go on
unperturbed, unimpeached
when you’re gone
from it
this, that and whatever,
with you or without you.
__3. Getting Out
Release from prison is not an off-ramp.
You leave still shackled
forever shackled
on the other side of freedom
on the wrong side of the fence.
The end of the sentence cannot be thought of as the end,
you carry it and will always carry it
locked up inside
like a germ you’ve become immune to.
There is no off-ramp until you’re done
until nothing remains of you
but the lost echo
of your presence.
Phantoms of who you were remain
to haunt
shadows of half forgotten lives.
Soon it all fades
sooner than soon
overwritten
discarded
gone, after that final release
where all life sentences
end.
There is the clinging to hope
a hopeless clinging
that some meaning
will become evident
some reason
this cruel ordeal
was necessary.
No sane reason is immediately apparent.
In a transactional world
good and evil are just transactions
and the law is neither moral nor just
it just
is.
The date comes.
The sentence is served.
But the walls do not crumble.
The fences and the wire
are internalized.
Forever an inmate
walks out the gate
not a walk into freedom
but back to a semblance
of what once was
and will never be again.
Identity
By Fernando Rivas
A compilation of socialization, impulses, urges
blind needs, nebulous thought patterns
dreams
what I am:
identity.
not free to choose
not free to be
I carry
identity
and the need for identity
and the loss of identity
and the question of
identity.
What is letting go of it
letting go of ego
of I am
of this I
of what I call myself
a name
a place
a set of coordinates
How would it feel being free
no longer me, without a name
or place
no longer this starving
this
identity.
Feeding it only makes it grow
and demand more
blinds it to everything
but itself
a blind NEED
senseless
when ultimately it is pointless
finite
terminal.
I don’t want to identify
or testify
or belong
the question is what else is there?
am I just a stray bullet
missing the target
the parabolic arch of my descent
always steeper
drawn by gravity
down into the failing
entropy
of matter.
I leave my mark here with these words
and hope you are looking and listening
not through the lense of
your
identity.
Lose that and see where I’m going:
Is there another geography
unmapped
that we have missed?
Or are we just repeating echoes
of other selves
What music may assail us in this void?
And to walk on into what universe?
Entities without identities.
I have questioned and found
no answers.
The bleak revelation is that at the center
there may be nothing
empty wind
chaos
lunacy.
We live in the urgent moment
without logic or knowledge
and passion is only
a fragile mirage:
identity.
Forsake it and you forsake nothing.
SEA OF STARS/SKY OF MEMORIES
By Fernando Rivas
La vida como firmamento – los astros como momentos
Life like the heavens – stars like moments
Algunos mas brillantes
Some brighter than others
Los que recuerdo y los que olvido
The ones I remember and the ones I forget
En dias claros o dias nublados
On clear days or cloudy
Los que se quedan fijos y los que nos ciegan
The ones that remain fixed and the ones that blind us
Cada uno de nosotros un universo entero
Each of us an entire universe
Y la noche como un idioma
And the night like a langugage
O todos los idiomas
Or all the languages
y la musica
and music:
Un mar de astros – un cielo de recuerdos
A sea of stars – a sky of memories
Desde nuestro primer respiro hasta el ultimo
From our first breath to the last
El firmamento interno mantiene su dialogo
The internal universe continues its dialogue
Nos asombra y nos aterra
It awes and terrifies
Mas su presencia es imposible de ignorar
Yet it is impossible to ignore its presence
Sol, luna, planetas – un cielo infinito
Sun, moon, planets – an infinite sky
Interno
Within us
Misterio y revelacion
Mystery and revelation
Con que palabras se describe?
What words can describe it?
Con que idioma se explica?
What language can explain it?
Somos cada uno un firmamento
Each of us a sky
y los astros
and the stars
cometa o asteroide
comet or asteroid
buscando lo eterno
searching for the eternal
interno
internal
encontrando solo el momento
finding only the moment
breve y brillante
brief and brilliant
antes de desaparecer, mas alla de la orbita
before disappearing, beyond the orbit
libres de la gravedad, lenguage y tiempo,
free from gravity, language and time.
SEAGOVILLE GOODBYE
By Fernando Rivas
Still in Seagoville
snug in my cell
like a snail in its shell.
Still in Seagoville
waiting to get out
soon
wondering what in the world
this was all about.
Still I chill in Seagoville
while chaos spins out there.
Here we live without a care:
no rent, no bills, no single worry
what a sad and pointless story
from day to day
and all the same
through heat or cold
through wind or rain
no weather really touches us
no problem really worries us,
all here are fed and cared for
the living dead__ it’s such a bore
we watch TV and eat and sleep
did I mention sometimes we weep?
I’m still in Seagoville
snug in my cell
like a snail in a shell
or maybe a corpse in a mausoleum,
paying my debt counted per diem
awaiting release
like a resurrection
but nothing at all
like true salvation.
That, my friend, is above my pay grade
for me the best outcome is simply a slow fade
out there among the living
and away from Seagoville
where I’ll find no forgiving
though I’ll breathe cleaner air
and walk by the sea
maybe sit in the shade and drink
camomille tea.
Seagoville will stay in my mind
when I leave it behind
here I’ve been
here am I
at Seagoville FCI
losing my life a bit at a time
longing for something
that may no longer be
something my eyes will no longer see
a life I once had
a bit lame, a bit sad
but that’s how life is
what you had when it’s gone
is what
truly
you
miss.
OFFENDER
By Fernando Rivas
. . .
“…people and groups who seek power and division do not bother with
dehumanizing an individual. Better to attach a stigma, a taint of
pollution to an entire group.” [Caste; Isabel Wilkerson, 2020, Random House]
“Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating
who you are.” [On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; Ocean Wuong, 2021, Penguin Books]
. . .
1.
I was, am and will always be a SEX OFFENDER.
This is my U.S. Government-Imposed Social Identity,
my Yellow Star of David (with apologies to Nazi Holocaust victims).
Once a SEX OFFENDER always a SEX OFFENDER.
One may come up with the cure for all forms of cancer.
One is still a SEX OFFENDER.
One may learn ten languages and be able to read Plato in Greek
Voltaire and Zola in French
Tolstoy in Russian.
That changes nothing.
One may undertake the study of chemistry or astrophysics
be able to rattle off the table of elements
and how many electrons meander about the nucleus
in beryllium.
One is still a SEX OFFENDER
a social outcast
an untouchable.
One may compose five symphonies, three operas, ten string quartets,
fifty-eight chart-topping pop tunes,
two award-winning musicals,
win a Nobel prize__
no one cares.
One remains irrevocably and inescapably always a SEX OFFENDER.
SEX OFFENDER SEX OFFENDER SEX OFFENDER
One may undertake missionary work in the poorest neighborhoods
of Bangladesh
help save African villages from Ebola
all of which will automatically seem suspect, be investigated.
One may discover a new system of propulsion that would facilitate space travel
One may evolve a new system of mathematics
One may start a new religion,
one, of course, with no followers.
Regardless.
Alone in an ivory tower or in some homeless shelter
or under a highway overpass
One remains forever a
SEX OFFENDER SEX OFFENDER SEX OFFENDER
One will always be a SEX OFFENDER.
There is no defending one’s identity
and no possible demonstration of reform or restoration
no possible forgiveness or retraction
no redefining.
The label is impermeable and indestructible,
tattooed on the skin of one’s life
of MY life
like an Auschwitz number (again, my apologies to the six million dead).
In America we SEX OFFENDERS are not methodically slaughtered through starvation, slave labor or gas ovens.
We are socially and spiritually murdered and forced into zombie existences
robbed of family, friends, social roles, work and all human connection
never free, scapegoats and boogeymen for life
debt to society never paid in full,
necessary boogeymen that provide votes for crafty politicians and help maintain a profitable
incarceration system,
that feed media frenzies
because nothing else so scandalously attracts those who have done the same and never been caught
or those whose righteousness is merely a repressed wish for what they would like to do,
nothing else is as juicy or popular as a sex scandal or the
arrest and perp-walk of
a
SEX OFFENDER.
Whether your prison sentence is two years or fifty two years
it makes no difference. Public shaming and prison are crucial requirements.
Whether you gathered images of nude underaged persons on the internet
or chatted about sex with a minor (or a cop pretending to be one) on the internet
and (Heaven forbid) exchanged or produced images portraying underaged nudity on the internet
had consensual sex with an underaged person
or violently assaulted and raped someone
it’s all the same.
Worse for you if your social position was one of respect: priest, professor, coach, politician.
Not so much if you were in the legal profession or law enforcement.
For those that can’t pay or weasel their way out
there are no higher or lower degrees of sex offender, there is only
SEXOFFENDERSEXOFFENDERSEXOFFENDER
Your life no longer belongs to you and no punishment will ever be enough.
Shame is your new skin, your ‘stigmata’.
THIS is what you are:
CHOMO! BABY RAPER! DIAPER SNIFFER!
Post-mortem Jeffrey Epstein is the sine-qua-non of the SEX OFFENDER experience.
Acts of teenage prostitution presented before Congress as
assaults
violations
rape
if these unfortunate girls-females-women (henceforth known as victims or survivors)
portrayed here as if they had no choice or ability to decide their collaborative actions
if they had
robbed or murdered
they would have unquestionably been tried as adults.
That a lowlife wannabe billionaire money/fame chasing parasite should paralyze an entire nation’s legal system
for being involved in the kind of exploitative activity that has existed in human society from time immemorial
is sobering.
He is no longer Jeffrey Epstein
he is “Disgraced, Predator, Pedophile Epstein”
And yes,
SEX OFFENDER.
Never mind who his friends in high places were.
Where this absurdist crusade ends is a mystery.
Perhaps AI will find a solution:
castration for all men at birth
brain surgery elimination of the ‘offending’ sex drive in males and females
test tube babies
created to pre-arranged genetic perfection
a world of gender-less clones.
There will be no age restrictions for sex
no communication about sex
because there will be no sex:
Easiest path forward.
Existing sex offenders from a prior era
will wither and die in isolation camps
retirement communities if you will
where they will spend their last days
allowed to
watch only reruns of ancient sitcoms or reality shows on flatscreens.
They will be treated humanely
but with utter disgust
until the last one
is
dead.
. . .
2.
And who are these SEX OFFENDERS?
This shadow horde of PREDATORS lurking out there in cyberspace
from which we need to protect all
CHILDREN?
Define it as FEAR. FEAR of SEX. FEAR of DEATH. FEAR of the UNKNOWN.
America and its multitudes of prissy spoiled brat citizens
afraid of their own shadow
lost in ignorance and avoidance of the most basic facts
sold consumable products on television through fantasies of talking cartoon animals and vapid musical backgrounds
shielding themselves from the harsher realities of existence
wealthier than any society ever before in history
yet doped up with silly infantile illusions
self-centered, egotistical, manic, xenophobic, homophobic
or just plain phobic.
Children must be spared being ‘groomed’ for SEX but must be instead ‘groomed’ for RELIGION, CORPORATE MONEY-MAKING and WAR.
Who are the SEX OFFENDERS I’ve shared prison with?
Chemical engineers, theologians, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, business owners, politicians, Ph.D candidates, coaches, teachers, principals, motivational speakers, military men.
Also autistic, almost blind and otherwise crippled individuals, men in their 70s and 80s in wheelchairs, obese men, Black, White, Asian, Inuit, Native American,
men of all ages and stripes, queer, transgender, incels.
Men awash in shame made quiet and sheepish for the most part.
Men who no longer have a place in American society,
most for gawking at internet imagery of underaged persons
for MASTURBATION, the REAL reason for their long incarceration (for how dare they?)
for FANTASIES
because America will crush all FANTASIES that are not about PRODUCTIVITY and SUBMISSION to the FINANCIAL ORDER.
These men are fated for extinction and oblivion, every last one of them.
There is no coming back.
Such a large crop of SEX OFFENDERS (ostensibly in the millions) must say something deeper about our American society.
There is some vast post-Victorian hyper-moral emptiness at the heart of it all
some repressed fury.
And the overwhelming obsession with pictures
the absurd notion that each act of viewing
is an act of EXPLOITATION
RAPE WITH THE EYES
VOYEURISM AS ASSAULT
the intrusion of two dimensional past tense into the
three dimensional present
a LEGAL VIOLATION
a CRIME.
And the HARM.
There is such imponderable HARM for underaged persons in learning about SEX.
Because SEX is FILTHY and DANGEROUS
and above all
TOXIC.
It is allowed to be a constant running joke everywhere
provoking uncomfortable giggles
but when it is real
when it rears its UGLY HEAD, erect,
it must be
stamped
out.
I want to say:
SEX OFFENDERS, you have nothing to lose but your shame.
But how is this mass of feeble-voiced, embarrassment-ridden OFFENDERS ever to regain
any kind of human dignity?
There is no way out and every day for the last forty seven years
it has only become worse for them,
stiffer fines
longer sentences
on and on.
Social murder with a smiling humane face.
It’s the American way
destruction through courtrooms and archaic laws
prisons that serve holiday meals
DBI
Death by incarceration.
There__
There it is__
The REAL HARM:
creating phantoms and rendering them invisible.
It’s the American way.
. . .
3.
There are degrees of disruption, levels of amplitude.
American society is no longer able to discern
or measure
this amplitude.
A screaming whine runs through the entire spectrum
simplified, narrowed into prescribed categories: good and evil,
deceptive metric
fueled by media noise, money, pundits, power, hubris, ignorance.
Violence is a bottom feeder, gnawing away at the social fiber.
Fear further fuels violence and all sorts of phobias and uncertainties spawn
like bacterial larva.
It becomes ever more difficult to tell the true offender from the mere fantasizer
when fantasies of disruption surround and invade all of us
when those easily misguided pick up military weapons to execute senseless murderous missions.
It is no longer possible to categorize the offender by the offense.
All of us, offenders and non-offenders are stigmatized in a system of winners and losers.
And there is no mercy or forgiveness in a zero-sum game.
We have all become offenders
participants in a larger drama of consumption
where no one is exempt
no one is free
no one is innocent.
We have become cannibals feeding on the shame and guilt of others,
the rabble itself craftily fed by a ruling elite with cheap fantasies run amok.
Who and what is offended becomes a difficult question.
Finding offenders a much easier bargain.
Finding those who will expiate our sins
and provide solidity
where there is nothing
is where we now find ourselves.
I am an offender. That is my role. That is how I am defined.
And as such I must decide to continue
surrender
or rebel.
And though the prospects for the future are dark
there is a faint glimmer of hope.
After all, who sits in the White House at this very moment
in the Oval Office
elected by a significant majority of American citizens…
who else
but
a SEX OFFENDER.
In the Time of Taylor
By Fernando Rivas
Amnesia predominates.
Attention spans diminish.
Skeletal females dance sporting garish Kabuki theater makeup.
There is nothing erotic in it.
The dance is an abstract reference to a memory of
something sexual.
As are the songs.
Muted whimpers
artificial sexuality
censored and repressed
fantasies of romance
as frail as paper lanterns
the sighs and groans of defeated sprites
of forlorn childhood
of terrible adolescence
of fear
and loneliness
hidden behind (or inside) the monotonous
electronic thumping.
It is a time to sell all that is false and ephemeral
to shield the ignorant from the exploitation
that is grinding them down daily
to feed them sugar-coated trash
excrement dipped in honey.
It is a time for suicidal romanticism
to die for nothing
to live for nothing
to yearn for wealth and envy those who have it:
multimillion beachside homes
extravagant clothing
parties
luxury cars and watches and yachts and private country retreats
(as featured in the Robb Report)
prissy landscapes bought and paid for
through the proliferation of slums and death
elsewhere
AI
and the wasting of the earth and the air
the wolfish consumption of the planet
to the murmuring of teenage adulation
Swifties everywhere
by the millions
buying four thousand dollar tickets
and joining the fan club.
There they are, America’s Adorable Archetypes:
the football player and the homecoming queen.
Sing it, Taylor.
Could this picture be more perfect?
Accept it and mourn.
In the time of Taylor we all sleep
while the world
slowly then more Swiftly
unravels.
Chorus
By Fernando Rivas
Clusters of them, white-faced, multi petaled
a central core honey-gold
flank the compound walkways
tiny flowers
huddling together
all along the way on either side
guiding lights on a runway
always in late autumn
before winter erases them.
They sing the same monotone melody
survival and joyful presence:
we are here now
and now is all there is
ignored, unseen
the inmates passing by on predictable
paths in and out of the unit.
I have thought to pluck them but relented.
Plucked they wither quickly
their song stifled.
As individuals they are pitiful and tiny
lost without their bretheren.
Only as a chorus do they thrive.
Like us they reach upward toward sunlight
and live even if no one hears their silent melody.
Small groups of them harmonize and blend
call out to us though we do not hear
a clorophyll chorus of hope and beauty
along a concrete path of ugliness and death.
Reentry
By Fernando Rivas
Fingernail moon and copper-hued streetlights
outside the coiled wire,
another lap around the rec yard track
soon to be memory
something left in me of this concrete trap
nightfall and goodbyes.
I curse myself to remember and wonder
after
and what’s coming after
unknown
and what passes for the present
unfelt.
As a wingless yardbird will I fly
when the time comes
the unprepared leap:
reentry they call it
like the space junk burning
as it falls to earth
sparkling and gleaming
or
the gloriously dismantled
hopes
drawn down by gravity’s
pitiless pull:
returning astronauts set ablaze
like hapless comets
their craft disintegrating around them
halos
in final reentry flight.
That moon up there where they journeyed
still fixed implacably in the sky
like a changeless Christmas ornament
our lives below repetitive
like laps around this track
monotonal
like prison
a morbid and delusional routine.
Home is the unanswered question
our need for it
a mirage easily dismantled
like that doomed space flight
meaning to orbit
but drawn to shatter and streak
through the atmosphere
discarded
claimed by time and planet
to finality.
They will release me
but will I release myself?
Is freedom only the illusion
of the prisoner
or an unfulfilled promise
for all,
the bustling mass of humanity
not huddling, not free
but simply
alive.
Longing
By Fernando Rivas
Narcissus stares into the once clear pool
now a dark muddiness of sewage and industrial waste,
the greasy sludge of human progress.
His reflection floats there in the debris.
The gods have fled.
Abandoned, Narcissus is condemned to old age
and its attendant ugliness.
Yet still there is beauty there
that only he can see
that he conjures from his flesh:
the familiar sensual neediness,
still present.
It may take him centuries to die
as an abandoned Immortal.
Now he senses the whispery caress
of possible death.
He avoids the world and hopes it avoids him.
He walks among other humans
and is not seen,
no longer appreciated
for his self-perceived beauty.
Still lithe of limb and sinuous
neither male nor female
but hybrid
full still of self love.
Since no one else will love Narcissus
he must love himself
and still he (or perhaps she) is condemned to bathe
in the filth of the once clear pond
in this overcrowded and polluted century
so distant from the times he once inhabited.
His still flawless though aging flesh glistens in the foggy sunlight
ghostly
the air thick with chemicals
and he longs for something
unreachable
a longing turning into desire
a desire consummated
drowned in the filth.
At times he longs for finality
but something inside extends, delays.
This longing:
Is it for the World?
Is it for Another?
Is if for him/herself?
Longing fills Narcissus
even in this sad and empty time of corruption.
Moratorium
By Fernando Rivas
Free verse or measured verse still leads to the hearse
or the crematorium, regardless.
So I propose a moratorium on creativity, this activity
that spins word upon word and rhyme upon time.
Trochaic and archaic, pentameter and hexameter
the gist of it a game of academic tomfoolery
Shakespeare, dead and buried, now plays in high schools,
life (as per the bard) but a fool that struts upon the stage and leaves it
wanting or leaves a legacy for professorial interest
but not itself life pulsing and breathing.
We breathe no more after the last stroke of pen or computer key.
Legacy is left for others not for oneself finally
to be understood or forgotten or misbegotten
my own life played out on the prison Score 7 tablet
sudoku and solitaire, card upon card and number upon number
all patterns and empty dreams and spinning neurons.
I give you cynicism with the edge of a grin like the blade
of a dull knife that only wounds but doesn’t kill:
one must laugh at fate rather than weep
the cosmic joke is on us
the human ape
and his scribbles
science and art illusions and shadows as the Universe
slowly spins toward entropic finality.
I don’t sing of the body electric but of the mind eclectic
an all too human mind drowning in the hyperactivity of the hive
commerce and greed a violent seed sown and now yielding
what
What exactly do we want from poetry in a world of
stupid money & AI
not a question but an answer, a moratorium on all art and science
for inefficiency and insufficency
what
Free verse or no verse
all the same
the minutes still drag by
villanelle or bagatelle
chanson, the same old song
no orderly words are ever sufficient
or efficient but still we wait
and most of what we call existing just remains
undefined
expiring under the impossible weight of time.
At A Loss
By Fernando Rivas
At a loss for words
a loss for time
we walk the fine line
between now and the infinite
what is there to say
and who can say
what lies beyond
the edge
or if anything at all.
When it comes to that
we are at a loss
neither poetry nor music
will reveal.
The empty hours of the day
will pass and mark
themselves upon each life
spent running from the
eventual
or embracing it
some of us trying to turn the forever into now
a foolish pastime
time past
time dragging on
time as the scythe that cuts us down
losing
leaving a loss
lost memory
lost hopes
lost dreams.
We operate at a loss
a lost proposition
a losing battle
a lost cause
every day a bit less
a bit more of a loss
some lose their way
some never know
some are here briefly
breathe this world and leave it
some wear out their welcome
some shine with vulgar brilliance
and vanish in ashes.
At a loss for words
to ward off the imminent
I struggle for the source
of this lament and find
only impatience
and a need to bring the cadence
and offer only this
what I could not find
in this limited space
what I wanted to find
that slipped away
and I dare to ask for another day
how many more no one can say
or dare not say
anything can shorten the stay
and we remain
at a loss
and fading away.
Broken Song
By Fernando Rivas
Prison ages you
through rages consumed
pages of conviction
statutes subsumed in jurisdictions
past addictions
derelictions.
Here: time is of no consequence
events devoid of significance
society’s twisted stance
moral justice
what it costs us.
Violence blossoms,
lurid boredom.
Prison cages you (a big dollar business)
caged and not engaged
shine until you fade
going to black
cancer or heart attack
where everyone ends up,
some of us sooner
unloved and forgotten
rejected
ejected/canceled.
Prison pages us
to the front punishment office
bureaucratic to the max
static
going nowhere, what’s to share?
The same old fare that walls are built on
shame and guilt.
It gets old
a story a thousand times told
you get old
mercy’s absent
so’s compassion
corruption reigns.
Flowers in the compound yard, fertile
welcome the rain,
wilt in the harsh summer.
We live and we die
in the wash of color
from the prison TVs
eyes blurred by nothing to see.
Prison stages us
performative
inmate and guard
wearing their garb
an ancient script
in desperate need of a rewrite
wrong or right.
Prison is a kind of death no one admits to
and no one wants to see
a place no one wants to be.
Outside the fence
in the land of the so-called ‘free’
this temple of offense
is a blight
kept out of sight.
No one wants to hear the whimpered plea
the broken song
where no heart belongs.
This is the measure of who we are
all of us
citizens and/or denizens.
These high walls encompass us all.
If the question has truly been asked
and prison is the answer
then
we
are
all
doomed
Bless-ed Zero
By Fernando Rivas
An Arabic idea
A circle
Zero sum, Zero gain, nada, bupkis:
A neo-capitalist endgame
a shooting gallery
another one down
a few more
through a church window
or down the college green
bullets fly
#MeToo a victim, all of us #MeToos.
All.
They want to say radical
or nazi
they want to say anything
that is not
that will not really define
this
endgame.
Zero sum. Zero gain.
What I do with my brain
before sleep:
Drain it of memory
and pain
Think zero.
Zero sum.
Zero gain.
Nada.
Bupkis.
That what it all comes to
no? yes?
the same ending
the same empy space
and me locked away in
zeroville
awaiting expulsion.
Zeroworld awaits me with icy arms.
Sleep now. Sleep maybe for always.
Maybe for an eternal zero.
Like my friend who took
zero pills to zero himself out
but is still around somewhere.
We all long for peace
and zero IS peace
bless-ed zero
sublime and eternal.
Nada.
Bupkis.
POETRY NOW
By Fernando Rivas
This poetry everywhere now
which is just
prose
with line breaks
is like a
rose
with no petals.
Just a
stem
and
some thorns.
LAST CALL
By Fernando Rivas
TO: Warden’s Office, SIS, AW
FROM: Monitoring Services
Nothing actionable. Just thought you guys would get a kick out of this one.
B.T.
TRANSCRIPT: Monitored phone conversation
1/27/2026
Inmate #78978-354
To approved contact [REDACTED]
Inmate: Yeah. Hold on, Dave. Don’t talk for a minute.
I gotta get something off my chest. No, no. Not
to you. This is my last phone call from this miserable
place before I’m out and I got some things I need to say
to the folks in the monitoring department. Or maybe to
the new AI they may have on the job.
You – the people listening to my voice and
recording everything I say… You miserable fuckface
morons. I hope you’re real happy with yourselves.
I don’t know how you can acctually sleep at night. You
taxpayer-money sucking parasite lowlife motherfuckers.
I guess you must really like your job, huh? Better
than flipping burgers I guess, right? Probably pays a lot
better too. Listening to guys begging or harassing their
baby mommas or some family member to send them money
for phone and commissary or hopelessly talking to their kids
trying to be a parent from in here or getting
the word their wives don’t ever want them back. Or getting
the news that their daddy or their momma or
their brother or their friend just died in some car
crash or from cancer or something. Yeah. I’m betting
that you don’t hear a lot of criminal plans being
‘crafted’ over these BOP phone lines. Guys use contraband
cell phones for that. And I’m pretty sure nobody thinking about
escape is gonna be talking about it here. What you
do get to earhustle on is all the misery and heartache your
fucked up prison system causes people. So I just want to
wish you a happy farewell, you slimy toads, you
subhuman trash. May you or your loved ones one
day rot in prison too so you know what it feels like.
Maybe you’ll end up having to use the BOP phone lines
too. Let’s see how you like it. Au revoir, motherfuckers.
Okay, Dave. So, yeah, like I was saying, I should
be in the halfway house by tomorrow night…
[REMAINING CONVERSATION REDACTED]
FALLIBLE
By Fernando Rivas
I am fallible
liable to err
prone to mistakes.
For this I take responsibility.
For this I cite my humanity.
I do not choose to escape
this futility.
What castles people build
are only impermanent
even the most noble of stone temples
crumble into glorious ruin.
Only the ephemeral truth of music
living in the moment it sounds
carries some sense of
eternity.
Music properly channeled makes no mistakes
and allows no fallibility.
It merely flows
as I have longed to do
despite my shortcomings.
I build no castles and leave no concrete legacy.
Along the way I have scribbled some melodies,
sketched some verse
poured my fallibility
into song and prose
where it may remain
unseen.
Fallible is human
fallible
terminal
erasable.
We arrive, stay a while and depart.
The fleeting moment is all there is.
TWO JANES
By Fernando Rivas
So the clock winds down and memory buzzes still
of the two Janes, years apart
loves of my past
should I say my careless (thoughtless) past?
At sixteen: Jane one.
At thirty-nine: Jane two.
How the rapture of love deceives and distracts.
Beautiful girls, both,
attention-grabbing, head turning.
Jane one: the daughter of a belly dancer.
Jane two: an aspiring actress and singer.
Both dark-eyed and sinuous
different from my marriage choices
not night and day exactly
but maybe dawn and noon.
Both were seaside romances
infatuations
flirtatious departures
Miami memories
of a Miami that no longer exists
except in memory
a place that shimmered with unreality
even as I lived there
a Miami of the spirit
a Miami of lost longing
of indeterminate desire
of anxious youth
of magical music
a mist of words set to silent rhythms.
Now, from this present fossilized perspective
one could call it nostalgia
to remember the two Janes
the Miami that is no longer mine
if it ever was.
Jane one was the dance.
Jane two was the music.
Both dreams I chased down
but never captured.
Now there’s only noise and chaos
an intolerant intolerable loneliness
of memory
and longing
a pointless life
and two wives left abandoned.
TEMPORARY HOUSING
By Fernando Rivas
Look in the mirror and there is your home:
bone muscle and flesh
blood organs and brain
eyes that capture the reflection,
this where you live
inside impermanence
which daily degenerates
losing esthetic appeal
as time passes.
Aging well?
There’s no such thing.
Aging is aging
accept it or not.
This traveling circus of biology
is impermanent and decaying.
Maybe best to die young and
be remembered__
Or not.
Live as long as possible
tempt fate
discover new identities
possibilities
or simply
observe the gradual diminishment.
Was once me, still me
small and vulnerable,
despite all delusions of grandeur.
Moving on, passing through
wading through memories
until there are so many
they threaten to drown you.
Unlit and unrevealed
unraveled
is the history of this temple
this housing
this bag of bones
and all its travels
all its triumphs and mistakes.
Temporary allows only one possibility.
Enjoy it while you have it.
Unique.
It will house no one else.
And though it is yours
for the moment
you will never own it.
FLOOD (Texas, June 2025)
By Fernando Rivas
The rain comes in the nowhere time between night and morning
the clouds bloated with it feed the river
so quickly the rushing waters overflow
too quickly
thrusting rolling and sweeping
crashing
uprooting trees mangling houses upending vehicles
sweeping away life
twisting familiar landscapes into unrecognizable shapes
wrenching sleeping angels from their summer beds
bearing them away.
The flood has no regard for life and no respect for anything human.
It is driven by quantity and gravity and physics.
It abolishes and negates all frail hopes.
Fire reduces to ashes
water rushes and undermines
and kills more deliberately
takes longer and is more willful,
so peaceful when contained,
fierce when unbridled.
Rivers of time sweep all of us in their current
toward some inevitable end.
What we call time has also no regard for its effect
things tumble and drift and crash
end up as debris
the unrecognizable debris of the years
the waste.
So many angels have been lost
and all that’s left is photographs
short lifes taken
while ours go on as we drift downriver
struggling against an impossible flow.
There is no rescue or recovery
and no closure possible.
The flood of time is irreversible
and cannot be forecast
with precision.
We are all borne on the crazed tide
sinners and innocents
taken on the surging waters
robbed of agency
and even of the illusion of agency.
NEW SKIN
By Fernando Rivas
I’m shedding the past like a snake shedding skin
squirming a path, a new way to begin,
a new birth of hope, an end to despair
along with the fact that I’m losing my hair.
Been here too long is my quaint little song
for prison’s a gauntlet no one survives
you know you succeed when you get out alive.
Those who don’t know assume that I’m pleased
now that I’m close to the date of release
but the longer you’re down
the more time you’ve spent
getting out seems as hard as the day you came in
and this new skin I’m growing
may be very thin.
What’s been taken away cannot be replaced
all those people you loved and the dreams that you chased
adulation and such
acclaim and applause
just memories now that must be erased
if you want to stay sane
and not live with the pain – much –
leave it all in the dirt and just crawl away.
Snakes are survivors despite being maligned
they’re symbols of evil, omens and signs
they slither and scurry designed to avoid
the predator’s claws, the sharp rending teeth.
Their own jaws deliver a venomous bite
to those who may come with mischief in mind.
And what all do they need? Just a spot in the sun
to warm their cold blooded hide,
some bugs and small prey
to keep hunger at bay
not much of a party at the end of the day.
There’s no rhyme or reason to this kind of life
no time or season or family ties
no country or religion
just slither and sleep
and hope for the best
stay wary and ready even at rest.
In the Garden of Eden who knows what was said
was Eve just in the mood and then blamed the snake?
Regardless.
I choose to abscond in the soft meadow green
forget all I know, forget who I’ve been
and hope my new skin will shield me from pain –
from shame.
I’ll dwell by the daffodils at the edge of the hill
and spend most of my time (what’s left) keeping perfectly still.
ROMANTASY
By Fernando Rivas
Elves, trolls, wizards
seducing and succumbing:
this, the new fictional genre
selling millions
while US-made bombs
maim and kill
Palestinian
children.
Fantasies and ecstasies
consume public minds
that surrender
to the plunder
of greed-driven leaders.
Zombie-eyed before their
television and smartphone screen kingdoms
all succumb
seduced by
comic-book
nonsense.
We come to this:
that given optimum social conditions
humans create little of lasting value
and instead
become engrossed in their own
so-called
happiness
and
success.
Exploitation is most successful
when the exploited are
lulled into
conformity
and
stupidity
willingly.
The things being done in their name
become meaningless
death and destruction
happen elsewhere
just blips
on a screen,
the wailing of a wounded child
for its dead mother
nothing,
a hollow wind blowing outside
our tempered glass windows.
A soul cannot be bought online on Amazon,
there is no easily acquired
consciousness
and the buzz of social media
is no more than
the trilling of cicadas
in the blistering
summer heat.
This world we have made is being slowly unmade,
technology offers no escape
only less involvement
less awareness.
The masses vegetate,
kept well watered by illusions and fantasies (romantasies)
Newer darker realities will blossom
sooner or later
from which there will be
no relief.
There will be no memory and no history
only entertainment
for all
on a massive scale.
MY BIG BEAUTIFUL POEM
By Fernando Rivas
Chaos rules with a clown face
selling perfume, cellphones, Bibles.
Welcome this new day of
disorder.
An attorney told me:
you have no credibility as a
sex offender.
Well, I replied.
There’s a sex offender now in the
White House.
We are in a new dimensional space
no longer in a space race
or an arms race
but a race to the limits of
acceptability.
The law, you say
the protection of human rights.
Do we define who is human
and who isn’t
before
we
can
agree?
Some among us are aliens.
Some among us are animals.
Some among us are non-believers.
Those can be left off all lists
all consideration
ship them off
or lock them up
forthwith
in shithouses
surrounded by swampland.
Meanwhile the ringmaster must
introduce the next act.
The show must go on
bombings
wars
killings.
Television ratings must be maintained
at all costs
and what lures the masses
but
blood?
I hear them yapping, texting, posting
barking and sniping
energized by the smell of prey
a chorus of anonymous
haters and losers.
Many cite scriptures.
Chaos from all quarters.
Chaos rules with a benign smile
and a smug phrase
and the showy signing
of paperwork
caught by Congressional cameras.
It’s the bureaucracy of death
all the way to the top
this, we should note,
is the
Law.
But my attorney is right.
I have no credibility.
I am no one
a ghostvoice.
And if I refuse to smile
you must understand
I refuse the clown makeup
the garish redsmear toothy grin
the coal-circled eyes
the baggy pants and
outsized hats and shirt buttons.
My religion is silence,
patience.
There soon won’t be much of me left.
Nothing.
I leave you these scrawls
in memoriam
of what might have been
and never was
in the days when hope was possible
before
the clown car
arrived.
TASTY FAREWELL
By Fernando Rivas
I’m dropping cinnamon in my coffee these days
sweetening the sour:
old age and freedom from prison
lie ahead
well-laid traps.
I’m dropping a bit of honey on my duplex cookies
bitefuls of fake happiness
to smooth the way.
Like stupid,
old is as old does,
and I’m trying not to.
Anxiety has been a close friend I need to split from.
Angst for the future
the unknown
what comes tomorrow
what I’ve left undone.
So I’m sweetening my departure
what with my cellie’s prison brownies and lemon bars.
Not something I would have
ever considered.
His parting gifts.
Before prison I never enjoyed peanut butter,
found it unappetizing,
I’ve learned to become addicted to it
on crackers
bagels
right out of the jar
with strawberry jam
with cream cheese
on wraps with slices of cheddar.
Could be my taste has been corrupted here
like everything else
or maybe I’ve opened some new vistas
of normalcy
not previously available.
This now is my peanut butter world
my brownies, cheesecake, lemon bars world
thick, creamy, richly caloric
an evasive tactic
honeyed cookies with my cinnamon-hued coffee
how I put off tomorrow’s
bitterness:
this last taste of prison food.
YARD RECALL
By Fernando Rivas
It’s what you’re left with
when you leave here.
It’s what they say on the PA
to clear the compound
to send you back to the ‘House’.
This is not my ‘House’.
It has never been my ‘House’
will never be my fucking ‘House’.
But what you’re left with is the recall
the memory of the yard
of the yards
of the compounds
the long colorless years
of nothing
of stranger’s faces
of stupid chatter
of sitcom-like banter
of petty rules
of fights and rumors and rumors of fights
beatings and rumors of beatings
of guards and their senseless
shouting and grimacing.
Yard recall is the memory of emptiness
of where they housed you like an animal
stripped you and
chained you and your friends up like dogs
treated you how they thought (or said) was
humanely
but was just belittling and insufferable
medically neglectful even unto death
recall
of how and where you were
‘locked up’
is what inmates say
I’ve been ‘locked up’ for xyz years.
Maybe Fucked Up is a better term
where and how you’ve been
Fucked Up.
Yard recall is the memory of laps on a track around
an empty desolate place
a place where there are no connections
and no agency
where you are essentially nobody
a specter
a scarecrow
straw man
who needs to be recalled
lest you float away
scattered
in pieces
into the ether.
My memory is of hot days
laps around and around some track
less and less as the years weighed me down
less laps
less__
fading.
My recall is of a kind of pain that has
written itself so deep it will never
be erased.
My yard recall is a terminal disease.
There is no ‘House’.
There is no fucking ‘House’.
There will never be anything like a ‘House’
just a concrete pit
and what I would so dearly love to do
with my yard recall when I leave here
if I can
is transform it into
pure
unblemished
AMNESIA.
FLOW
By Fernando Rivas
Don’t think we’re apart from it
think: we’re a part of it.
Instead of Immortal
think: I’m mortal.
We exist in symbiosis
regardless of a social delusion
that we are anything else.
Never at the center of the Universe
never under God’s divine Overvision
never at human law’s mercy or cruelty
or love’s embrace.
We just are.
Organs and cells
chemistry functioning in primordial harmony
blood ovum and semen
sweat
hormones
enzymes
spit
mucous
a flow of ongoing molecules
like any other sentient and/or non sentient creature.
Express disgust (or despair) at this physicality if you will
but that will not change or defeat its purpose
or halt its trajectory.
We flow, my friend
beginning to end
each course plotted without our conscious
intervention.
We live and die
and the cycle goes on
despite
the Internet
late night comics
commercial breaks
streaming movies
electric vehicles
brutal dictatorships
natural disasters
This world now
our world
is just a transition.
We are in passing mode.
All of life
of this (whatever this is)
passing on
moving eternally
to unknown rhythms
and unknown destinations.
There is no future or past
no history or precedent
no predictability
no sustainability
no purely human construct
to survive
Not even the oceans or the heavens.
Nothing is immutable.
We are part of it
integral and biological.
Accept it and move on.
We flow.
YOU, INMATE
By Fernando Rivas
The hours slipping away
the hours days weeks months years
slipping away
taken away
stolen
never to be recaptured
relived
life slipping by
life slipping away
taken away
stolen
the sentence
the sentence that bears down
the sentence that bears down intolerably
the sentence that replaces life with half life
an endless sentence with no nouns or verbs
or adverbs
or prepositions
with no life
with emptiness
with crushing
certainty
hope banished
love lost
phone calls that come less and less frequently
until not at all
the world going by
voiceless
the world going by in minutes
the world going by in hours
the world going by in days
months
years
decades
until you are a ghost
until you are a shadow
until you are memories
old photographs
paper
sand
dust
until you want to forget but can’t
until you want to move on but can’t
until you is not you is not
anything
but
a
body
in
time
floating.
DNA
By Fernando Rivas
5/22/2025, 717 hrs.
This DNA, 73 years old, sits on the low metal bleacher behind the chain link
fence. On the other side of the fence is the prison baseball field. The softball
game has just wrapped up. It’s hot and cloudy. The spring day is disappearing.
A hazy purple sunset fills the horizon to the west. Inmates retreat toward the
housing blocks. I have been an inmate for twelve years. I’m less than a year
from release. My life after prison will be different. I’m hoping it will be better.
1.5 million years ago
This DNA emerges from the tree line into the savannah. Our group
is stalking a group of interlopers in our territory. We come upon them
and there’s a vicious struggle. Most of our group is killed. All the interlopers
are killed. Wounded but wild with excitement we bare our teeth and howl at
the fiery sun in a hot blue sky.
500,000 years ago
This DNA has just mated with two other females near the shore of
what one day would be called the Aegean Sea. The women have
brought berries and fruit. Night comes. We fall asleep to the lapping
of the waves on the shore. Two from our clan were attacked and killed
by a bear but we managed to escape. We will have to find a new cave
dwelling.
80,000 years ago
This DNA marveled at one of our group who has befriended a wolf.
He feeds it scraps of meat from our hunts and the beast crawls up
to the edge of our encampment on its belly sometimes showing its
teeth. I am drawn to this brave man who tempts the beast. He will
surely be one of my mating partners. We sit by the fire under a sky
full of stars.
17.000 years ago
This DNA wanders from place to place in an area that would one day
be known as southwest Asia. There are mountains in the horizon.
Our clan has come upon a place where men toss bits of plants
into the ground and make them grow. They make food out of the
plants. This is new magic. Our group thinks it good but still we
prefer to keep wandering. When morning comes we move on.
Maybe we’re looking for something better.
10,000 years ago
This DNA lives in a town at the foot of the mountains that will
one day be known as the Urals. We have crops. My sister makes
baskets. We’ve been attacked various times by marauders from
the north. Many of our town have been killed. We’ve managed
to fight off the barbarians but not before they set some of our
homes on fire.
5000 years ago
This DNA is a concubine in our Ruler’s court, a lowly life but
a safe and comfortable one. There is much strife in the world.
Far to the south near a great desert there lives a people who build
giant monoliths out of stone. Ambassadors from that empire have
come to our kingdom with tales of their cities.
2300 years ago
This DNA has been on the move, traveling north. The Roman
legions fought our Greek warriors on sea and land and we left
our war-torn city states. We believe our beloved empire will disappear.
The brutal Romans will take it for themselves.
Three of my family have survived. I lost my wife and two of my children.
1000 years ago
This DNA works in a monastery in southern Italy, a lonely
place in the mountains. We are humble peasants and
believers in the Lord’s mercy and we accept our station.
The monks treat my family well and we share the bounty
of their farmland.
213 years ago
This DNA is a French soldier in Napoleon’s noble army.
The Russian invasion has not gone well. We’ve lost many
men. I am returning to my town in the south of France.
My father wants us all to move to Spain and away from
all this insanity. I wonder if it will be any better there.
His brother, my uncle, is a poet and a dramatist there
and well known, established. He will help us out.
100 years ago
This DNA has gone to live in Cuba. I am the youngest
daughter in the Martinez family. We lived in a fishing
village in the north of Spain, Luarca. We have a farm
there known as La Granda. I did not get along with the
oldest brother We are a family of eleven. I will come
back to Spain in a few years with my young husband.
He will be murdered in the Spanish Civil War. I will
return to Cuba and marry another man. Fifteen
years later I’ll have a baby, my only son.
60 years ago
This DNA is 13 years old. It’s mid afternoon of a summer
day. I’m in the city dumping ground behind our quaint
middle class Miami neighborhood. It’s a three block long
stretch of trash mounds and gray muck. In the future it
will be gone, replaced with small apartment complexes.
I see my American friends in the distance. Sometimes they
let me join their baseball games. Other times they exclude me.
I still speak English with a Cuban accent. I don’t mind being
alone. I spend alone time a lot. The dump sometimes yields
interesting things that people have tossed out, magazines
with naked girls, an old baseball, a water gun. The place
stinks, specially after it rains. Now it is dry. My friends are
done rummaging around. They are leaving the dump, going
up a small hill on the other end, back to the fifth street
neighborhood. I think they saw me but they didn’t wave.
Clouds pass over the bright sun casting shadows.
REVELATION
By Fernando Rivas
Wings were burned off butterflies
birds were shot out of the skies in droves
flower petals were ground up for mulch
music was made into noise
noise was made into music
there were a lot of words
bookloads
there was confusion.
Clowns ran the circus
trapeze artists plunged to their deaths
lions routinely escaped the tamer’s cage
the audience members that were not devoured
cheered.
Carousels spun at high speeds
were flung off their base
children squealed then screamed
ferris wheels toppled down on
cotton candy vendors
roller coasters flew off the rails
out of brightly lit fairgrounds
landed in suburban homes
men watching football matches
didn’t notice their roofs caving in.
The earth slid off its orbit and
gravity was diminished
and people and cars and buildings
floated off the ground
joined angel choirs.
Religious sects cried out for law and order
politicians floated over the Potomac
the Washington monument levitated
pornographic imagery left thousands of
screens
filled the atmosphere
like
ashes
or sleet.
Not a sane voice was heard
was heard only a dog-like baying
wolf packs
coyotes
mountain lions
raced down wealthy neighborhoods.
Everyone had guns, including toddlers.
Loaded guns.
Someone had to be blamed
or shot.
Some were shot.
Mountain lions and toddlers.
Many.
Huge confinement pits were built.
Quickly filled with those defined as law breakers
those that had not drifted up into the stratosphere.
Somewhere anthems kept playing.
Flags waved.
Patriots got goose bumps.
And the nightly news continued to
produce
weather
forecasts.
LESS TALK
By Fernando Rivas
I should consider silence
the absence
of words.
I’ve said too much in the past
few things that will last.
There’s much to be said for
nothing to be said
no comment
a respect
for the majesty of existence.
How can such mystery be reined in,
corraled?
a wild horse
running free.
Every word is a rail on the fence
a brick in the wall
and the beauty is lessened
by definition
explanation
discussion
human babblings.
The passive voice is the only voice
when faced with the cosmic
the immutable
the unexplainable
the unreasonable.
Or what I should tell myself:
stop talking and start listening.
There is beautiful music haunting
the world
just and always
beyond
reach.
Aquarium
By Fernando Rivas
Inmate fish swim in circles
gray ground mud, white walls
common area aquarium
some move to and fro
others lie still
tread time water
make speech-like sounds
wait for feedings
remember the ocean
that now only comes in
on television screens
that I watch
every day
with no earbuds in
eating a cracker
crab like, my territory carved out
my (the BOP’s) plastic
chair
an anchor in the monotony
Once I had colorful siamese fighting fish fins
now I’m just claws
dry shell, angry telescoped eyes
that barely see
common area aquarium my daily haunt
all of us circling
pointlessly
flailing
where you goin? sometimes the guards bark if we swim out of bounds
nowhere, sir. I’m in prison.
Sir m’am all of them fish too
predator fish
choking on the same muck for a low end salary.
Where you goin? Goin nowhere fast
not wanting to be last to the chow hall
they rush the door when the PA speakers call chow.
There are hooks dangling, baited
a release coming soon
an impossibly curtailed freedom
a bigger aquarium
sometimes nets are cast for the
k2 fish
those that wander aimless or frozen
and who sold you the shit?
some octopus lurking in the plastic reefs
too many limbs outstretched
k2 suboxxin pot meth
some of the newcomers remember from the street
the shit the cosmic dust they got high on
tell us who, we’ll give you less time-treading
silly fish
fall in the net
end up in the SHU
and I just watch from my anchored chair
thinking myself safe
eyeing the dangling hook
the one baited with memories.
In the meantime the televisions play on:
LED imitations of reality
tread the time water tread it tread it
nothing real like strawberry fields
oh how we swish our tail fins
still
we are all just waiting to be reeled in
or to end up floating on the surface
dead in the water.
Liquid
By Fernando Rivas
Prison soap smells like medicine.
Institutional.
Pink.
Won’t wash away the stink
of men senselessly crowded
into small spaces
nowhere to go
lockdowns.
There’s no cleansing
of sins that leave no marks,
guilt
like tattoos
taboos
unerodable ink
imposed.
For weeks the soap dispensers are left empty.
Without warning they are refilled.
Pink puddles are the clue
by the sinks
sloppy
spills
of life gone awry, misused instincts
yearnings
misguided
why we end up here
these
felons.
Prison soap, like prison
smells like a solution
liquid
deceptive
bacteria continue to thrive
offenses
infractions
courtrooms.
A bad smell.
Who we are cannot be washed away
the offenders and the guards
opposite yet equals
all prisoners
flushed down the same sewer.
The law, you say
the law
every law reflects a flaw
law is fear
in the shape of written symbols.
Prison is soap
that smells like medicine.
There is sickness in this land
that no liquid will wash away,
there’s poison and no antidote.
April Fool
By Fernando Rivas
April flowers
April storms
April grasses
April worms
Vivid green
the prison lawn
in the chill of
prison dawn
out to breakfast
back to lockdown
April fool
inmate clown.
In your wrinkled khaki suit
shabby shapeless uniform
always looking at the ground
march along without a sound
crawl along the concrete walkways
back and forth and going nowhere
all the same, storms or worms
mist of morning in your hair
breathe the pointless morning air.
To the weightpile or the yard
there the warden there a guard
bored and grim like silent tombstones
faces drained of all regard
April, June or cold December
all the same if you remember,
still all memory will soon fade
now you know it’s all charade
it’s all for show and all for shame
all this pain and all the same.
And all the same this April morn
forget the past and be reborn
just like the blossoms on the trees
the chirping birds and buzzing bees
time’s a circle, time’s a trap
you tell yourself that it’s all crap
the time you’ve lost, so what,
that’s cool
what else are you but
April’s fool.
Stillborn
By Fernando Rivas
Something stillborn in me wants to sing
still
even now
dissonant and unacceptable
unredeemable maybe.
I have passed largely unnoticed through this life
unseen with this longing or
whatever
long past expiration date
youth nothing now but dim memory.
It’s always been there, an inexpressible
urge
struggling to find it’s way out
a failed effort mostly
never much good as music
only slightly better as words.
Poorly judged or dismissed or passed over
while this thing insisted:
a narcissistic belief maybe
that I might be capable of what
others can’t or won’t understand
though hoping someone would,
someone
somewhere
sometime.
I never could abide conversational poetry
sing-song prose in broken lines
or throwaway music
mundane
so I spill this on the page
insane
or inane
but full of some undefined energy
will it emerge and lie inert
lifeless?
It’s the only part of me now that refuses to fade
trapped in a womb of silence
stillborn to the world
unbirthed
but still
still
kicking.
Smoke
By Fernando Rivas
I hold memories of you in happy times.
They see me through this now, rays of light in this
dark,
held maybe too dearly.
You chose to leave me, walked away
into silence
and
with you gone
I have nothing left to say
out of words
for
once.
Only glimpses of the past
fading
fast.
We had a life of moments shared
of ups and downs
and I wonder if I was
really there.
And was I there before
And I have to ask
whether
I’m even
here
now.
Could be we’re just ghosts
all of us
smoke left from some primeval blaze
drifting over this planet
leaving evaporating trails
like this memory
I hold of you
because
nothing
else
seems
substantial.
Prison Ghosts
By Fernando Rivas
Old man well into his sixties
shabby khaki uniform
white cap
walking to prison chapel on
Easter Sunday
bible in hand
tattoos all over both arms
and up his neck
like some demented
five year old
scrawled on him with
a sharpie.
Dude rapping to himself
walking to chow
like no one else
exists
unintelligible
ghetto-speak.
Guy speed-walking the track
carrying some kind of backpack
face grim behind dark glasses
a black watchcap on his head
pumping his arms
like a cartoon
passing everyone
cursing slower inmates
who get in the way.
Autistic kid running up and down
the stairs in the unit
18 steps in one speed blur
down to the hot water for coffee
back up to his cell.
Dude daily disappearing into studies
between activities
silent as a tomb
behind an open book
perched on his high bunk
unaware (or too aware) of his ghostly status.
Dazed TV watchers glued to their seats
day and night
often into the early am hours
still there at midnight and 3am counts,
herded to their cells,
out again after counts,
back to the screens.
The TVs playing mostly
Ridiculousness
World Wide Wrestling
Superhero movies
Reality shows.
Ghosts, all of them
me included.
Stripped of life
left to fester in this
waystation of misery.
There is no return from prison
no Easter resurrections.
All are transformed into permanent ghosts
invisible and unpardonable.
More are being transformed
every day.
Disappeared into prison mist.
Erased and forgotten
offered up to the God of Justice
and Eternal Safety.
And the ghosting machine has been evolving.
Ghosts now are being made outside prison walls
empty persons.
A contamination perhaps
a pandemic
an infection.
Ghosts these days are everywhere
spreading their ghostly gospels
and winning hearts and minds
buying and selling.
All of us
quietly
disappearing.
Prayer
By Fernando Rivas
Pray, if you will,
if you must,
to Your Invisible Ghost in the sky,
a phantom of your own creation
but know this:
the Universe cares nothing
for our quotidian nonsense.
All prayer is electrical disturbance
in human neurons
filled with the vain hope
of a response.
Out there, beyond the Flesh,
is a realm that functions to the rhythm
of immutable laws
an immaculate perfection of
cause and effect
forces that have shaped
planets and stars.
We are but a sideline, a byproduct:
life
in all its astounding manifestations.
Order and chaos exist side by side
complementary
to pray for one and to avoid the other
is pointless.
Admire instead the amazing interplay
of these opposites
this selfmade Creation
this endless miracle
of saintly or murderous activity.
Pray, if you will
if you must
instead to the inevitable Flow
though you may never know
it’s purpose
if any.
Listen to the wind in the trees
the roar of the sea
the static hiss of the stars.
They speak an untranslatable language
that answers to no human prayer
and no human desire.
Pray, if you will
if you must.
But know this:
The only answer will be the muted
echo of your own silent voice.
GENE HACKMAN AND OTHER SOCIAL DISLOCATIONS
By Fernando Rivas
Hollywood stardom does not exclude social abandon.
Statistical probabilities of zero social contact or interaction in old age
is high for all
liberty for all
the freedom to be disconnected.
Once on the bright screen he shone and dazzled.
All looked up to the glory of his talent, drawn in and entertained.
Half a century or more has passed.
Now that brilliance seems only a flash like most other memories
forgotten starlight
sparks of neuronal activity
life so brief
as to disconcert
only a trace left on celluloid.
Bees of the colony live maybe a month or two.
The queen lives remarkably longer but at the cost of being the center of attention.
In the spotlight she, the self, melts into the communal
and that eventually into
nothing
death on the floor
spilled.
Millions in the bank buy nothing
but silence
the chirp of birds outside
rustle of wind in the trees
a sunlit afternoon
while you drift into
nothing
all memory gone
your cell phone (and brain cells) devoid of messages.
Were we meant for this? Were we meant for anything?
Gene and wife died alone
and unconscious
gone
consciousness being possibly only a burden
from which they were finally released.
No one knew.
It was on the news.
Now we all know
communal knowledge
the hive buzzing.
But soon no one will know anything or remember anything.
Isn’t that the true measure of liberty?
To be free of all contact, removed
to drift into the cold arms of the universe,
dislocated from ourselves.
Epiphany
By Fernando Rivas
[I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakespeare’s strain.
__Emerson (Essays, First Series)]
All of it comes down to
synapses, neurons, NMDA receptors:
symphonies architecture cities wars literature history science
all a chemical soup in hominid brains
a sharp monkey’s circuitry
Gods Devils constitutions justice space flight
just blips of electrical activity in
a gray biomass:
brilliant monkeys
Socrates Kant Nietzsche Freud Skinner
What is behavior but some formulation of
chemistry
a survival imperative
at the subatomic level
an undefinable energy
Mozart Chekov Miller Mailer Proust Rachmaninoff
monkey blather
monkey chatter
Heaven Hell monarchies democracies oligarchies communism fascism
Existential whys are senseless to pursue
there are no whys or wherefores
all those books filled with the cipher scribbles of language
are a spilling out of biochemical interactions.
When we say here and now there’s only where and how
we consume and digest
inhale and exhale
for a time
maintaining some sort of equipoise and eloquence
and then expire
and the biomass becomes nothing but a pile of stink
electrical signals cease
later only dry bone.
Or misfires and malfunctions wreak havoc
encephalitis
s-chiz-o-phrenia
misfits and serial killers
aggression in the monkey cage
war
murder and mayhem
as they used to say in the old days of radio
the old radio days
radio sending signals
an analog of neuronal connections
then television and computers and AI
connecting and connecting
civilization now also an analogue of
brain chemistry
all connections
a web
a spider web of chatter
optical cables and microwave towers and satellites
encircling (trapping?) the planet
like the billions of cells forming one brain
one mind
a hive mind
a singularity of consciousness.
But misfires persist, malfunctions at the macrolevel.
Brain chemistry is precarious
a delicate balance between nothing and everything
between sanity and lunacy
wired
we’re wired
and the wiring is biodegradable
our time here short
our thoughts misguided
and impermanent
not unlike the universe itself
grinding and expanding and turning
into nothing we can possibly understand
with our limited vision
our
fallible human brains
Jesus Confucius Mohammed Buddha Ghandi
holy biblical babble
spinning ever spinning.
I see it now and can’t unsee it:
what it is
beautiful, vulnerable
frightening.
The Box
By Fernando Rivas
They wanted to know about prison
for the thrill
what it must feel like
the danger
the loss
and they were captivated by
movie and television versions
clanking metal doors
grim-faced guards
rapes
beatings
riots
gray cells and bunks
rec yards where dangerous thugs loiter
in bright red uniforms
dark storylines.
They wanted to believe in blind justice
in consequences
for the bad people
even if the bad people weren’t always bad
and some were good
or even innocent
or good if not innocent (a harder sell)
and they wanted to believe so much
in justice
that they created mythological prisons
a mythology where sinners repented
where street thugs became gospel preachers
responsible citizens
where people left prison as “better” persons.
This is the only mythology they wanted to hear about
that inmates would heal and
society’s wounds would heal
that prison was necessary
and rehabilitative.
They would not hear of lives thrown away
of the empty antiseptic monotony
of the pointless and endless days
of nothing
that prison was just a box
where you put away the things you don’t want to know
or hear about
or think about
__trigger warning: REAL LIFE.
Humane they made it
they believed
there was medical and dental care
nominally
occasional suicide prevention
PREA
uniforms weren’t always striped jumpsuits
there were rec yards and hobbycraft programs
and of course
television and tablets and MP3s
and not all guards were grim-faced
and no one died in prison
only DOA at the nearest hospital.
But it was still just a box
and the things they didn’t want to know
or think about persisted
persist still
and prison changed/changes nothing
and things got/get worse
and they were happy to trade
freedom and justice
for some impossible sense of security
for simplistic answers
soundbites
and the guarantee that guns would still be sold
to anyone with the need to use them.
There were/are still wars, killings.
Prison is still just a box
and what’s in the box is carefully inventoried
thousands of times per year
and kept secure
and soundproof
so that the noise in the box cannot be heard outside.
Gray or white walls and double fences
insure the security
that is just a myth
the myth they all want to hear
the myth they want re-asserted
that we/they are fine
that the world is fine
that we/they are doing the right thing
the just thing
that we/they are not just animals
that the box is not a cage
this box
our box
Ours
Yours and mine.
LA MUERTE
By Fernando Rivas
They’re all dead
Who is?
They. Them.
Who are you talking about? Can you be more specific?
Specific? There’s no specific about it. It’s all of them. All of us.
Us?
You might be next. I might be next.
You’re being paranoid.
All of them are dead.
Who is dead?
I knew some of them. Some of them were famous.
You had friends that…
I didn’t really know many of them. We didn’t hang out or anything. They were in the public eye.
I don’t understand.
No one understands. It just is.
Look, what are you talking about?
What does it matter? It’s all the same.
Okay. Start again.
Okay. They’re all dead.
Who is?
All of the ones I knew, or most of them, and some I didn’t know.
Was there an accident?
For some. Others were taken while they slept. Others just…keeled over. A few did themselves in.
Did they…were they involved in something…illegal?
Ha. Illegal? We’re all involved in what they were involved in, my friend.
What do you mean?
They were alive.
You said some were famous.
Yeah. Whatever fame is. They had a name. They lived public lives.
Did the authorities know that they would…?
The authorities? You mean the cops? Cops don’t know shit until it happens. Anyway, cops are on the list too.
Well, just how many people are we talking about?
How many? Hell. Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. It’s been going on for a long time.
That’s impossible. Nobody had a clue that millions of people would die?
Of course they did. Everybody knew. Everybody knows what’s going on. It’s no secret.
So what IS going on?
Blood circulating. Food being digested. Tissues replicating.
You’re being purposefully cryptic.
Sometimes tissue doesn’t replicate correctly. In fact, the older you get the worse it gets.
It?
The replication.
I’m not sure this conversation is going anywhere.
No conversation ‘goes’ anywhere.
What about peace talks, cease-fires, resolutions, constitutions?
All bullshit. All of those talkers and writers will be dead sooner or later. There’s no mercy. It’s inevitable.
Surely there is mercy. Surely there is something to believe in, something enduring.
You mean like God and Heaven?
Well…
Bullshit. All of it.
You’ve certainly got a negative streak.
Not really. I’m just a realist and I accept what I’ve observed.
What you’ve observed? Like what?
Like…they’re all dead. All of them.
(Sighs with frustration.) Right. And we’re next.
More than likely. In fact, no. Certainly.
For Sy
(to Sy Safransky, founder of The Sun magazine)
By Fernando Rivas
To be uplifting is maybe a sham,
making sunshine out of darkness
going against the flow
which is ever downward.
To choose that road you must be a worthy flim-flam man,
be able to sell ice cream to the Inuit,
go against all sane intuition.
find a good brand of snake oil to hawk,
offer hope which is in high demand
and always in short supply,
sell salvation to the wicked.
In that role you bring light even as yours fades.
You go against the tide with every breath.
To be uplifting is maybe a calling,
or a falling.
We all fall in the end anyway
all of us victims
our end a fiery crash or a last rattling breath.
You sell what you sell for that brief glimpse,
that frail wish,
that maybe something matters,
makes a difference,
changes something,
while the world rattles on
and time crushes everything in its path.
To be uplifting you must first raise yourself
or forget yourself
or remake yourself.
You must get to the roots of yourself.
And find whatever may be there,
whatever is left to share,
before silence claims it
and sunshine, as it does daily and
inevitably,
melts into night.
Cynical Times
By Fernando Rivas
In the days of bellbottoms and beads and peace symbols
everything was questioned
long standing pillars crumbled.
There had recently been wars and destruction on a massive scale
and questions became necessary.
But much too soon it all became just fashion statements
pop art
TV shows
da-glo
and soon the old answers were reapplied
the same tired platitudes
though great dissatisfaction
and division soon
overtook them.
They (the ‘People’) soon drowned in technologies.
Moralities became irrelevant
music no longer had anything important to say
literature slipped into obscurity
and they lived their lives
in the glow of screens
and hand-held devices.
Prison became an industry
and no one was clear on what legal meant.
Power bought its way in as it had always done.
There was no glory and no solidarity
just ads for big pharma
and comic book heroes.
There were lone voices that no one heard
or cared to hear
lost in the roar of the Beast Voice of Money.
There was glitz and comfort for many
but dark angst prevailed.
Dark angels roamed suburbia.
Acts of senseless killing multiplied
guns could be made by printers
the Word become death.
Old glories were held up as goalposts
but nothing could be made great again
only gray again
only colorless
only senseless
it was questioned whether greatness had ever been.
They got busy talking about sustainability and equity and inclusion
but it was just busy talk
and real change never came
and never will come.
Some know that
but will not speak it.
Cynical times, these.
Shatterman
By Fernando Rivas
He can disassemble himself into fragments
at will
pebble-sized and even smaller
down to a few molecules
skittering fragments that can
slip under the crack under a door
or the seams of a wall
into places only insects can manage
or travel in packages
suitcases
boxes.
At will he can reassemble himself
re-integrate his body
to normalcy.
While scattered, each bit continues to harbor
will and consciousness
SHATTERMAN’s pieces are all him,
all one.
Shattering and scattering is a pleasurable function.
And when sad or overcome
SHATTERMAN will SHATTER
to ward off the depressions
by which he is periodically tormented.
Science could not explain this ability of SHATTERMAN
though he was thoroughly studied
prodded and probed
by the best minds.
His power was unexplainable as
that of all superheros.
Not everything is known after all
and much can be imagined.
He eventually swore off fighting crime however,
unlike his colleagues.
He began to have philosophical conflicts,
become unable to discern
good
from
evil.
He believed his powers might be
evil (as such) in some way.
He could slip into government facilities
and tamper with files and equipment
he could be a menace
though he chose to not be.
He could slip into machinery and mechanisms
and cause malfunctions
though he chose not to.
The reality is SHATTERMAN only chose
to disassemble and reassemble himself randomly
without purpose
which led him to avoid human contact
as much as possible.
He became a recluse beyond reach.
In his solitude he explored the
molecular structure of the world
finding no joy in divining secrets
humans hungered for
on a daily basis.
At times he scattered himself on a beach in early morning
upon the warm sand
his fragments rolling across dunes
like an insectile horde
into the waves
under the water
where he need not breathe
fragmented biology needing little oxygen.
Often he disassembled in wooded areas
and the many pearl-sized bits of him
rushed up tree trunks to the
high canopy of the forest.
Insects at once refused to bother with him
all living things repelled.
SHATTERMAN is an energy
alien to the biological world
and his presence in the trees drove away birds
and squirrels.
He was disruptive but harmless.
It was as if Nature allowed him to survive
on his own terms.
SHATTERMAN eventually wandered off
the socially accepted ethical path
and was arrested.
He could have easily escaped
but allowed himself to be
transported to and from courtrooms
and to and from county lockups.
Eventually, found guilty
(of various and sundry poorly defined violations)
he was placed
in a completely hermetic cell in federal maximum
security,
no windows
chow provided through an airlock
a flatscreen TV on the wall that he seldom watched
though it was on 24 hours a day.
SHATTERMAN found it all humorous.
He could have easily escaped from the
special cell
at any time
by disassembling himself
into the food tray returned through the
airlock.
Or into the television to scatter himself
through electrons in the transmission and reception
system.
His guards were lazy and stupid and
he could have reassembled himself into
their bodies and left prison.
Unquestionably that would have meant their biological death
SHATTERMAN didn’t feel such acts were necessary.
He accepted his lengthy incarceration.
After all, he was immortal and indestructible.
And he could use the time away from society.
He spent most of his days assembling and disassembling
himself
a process that his guards
found amusing.
At times the fragments were so small
they were invisible to the human eye
but the sensors placed in his cell
continued to betray his presence.
Sure wish I could do that,
one guard said to the other.
Looks like it might be fun.
Was the response.
Released after decades SHATTERMAN
built himself a cabin in a wooded area.
He watched the human world unravel and destroy
itself.
He was unmoved.
In the end he was left alone
one of the last living creatures
on the planet
assembling and disassembling
himself
for eternity
with no perceivable purpose.
Cyclical
By Fernando Rivas
I.
Autumn leaves drift off trees
sad songs
the memory of piano keys
remembering
as it all fades
color no longer vivid.
Cold winter air
being here and nowhere
not being
hugging close to this life
as it all fades
the sounds no longer vivid.
I was and am and for a while longer
will be
insubstantial
forgotten
unnoticed
have stopped asking why
why this why that
while the world rolls on by.
This world or that world
so they say, whys notwithstanding,
will suffocate or freeze
eternal summer or winter
there is an extinction
all extinctions being just the birth
at the brink of something else.
I am still here but already extinct
exiled
a living fossil in this vacant
world of falling leaves
of eternal autumn.
Remembering love (or music) like a discarded shell
left behind in time
should I welcome this melancholic silence
I should welcome this melancholic silence
Should and would if
only
letting the words fall
plucked from the branches
you there, leaf,
once green,
did you think yourself an individual?
Got news for you.
You’re just fodder for next year’s upswelling
fertilizer, as such
it’s all cyclical
living
dying
heat
cold
extinction
rebirth.
The best music only drifts
has no pattern
disappears
and leaves no
trace.
The rest is noise.
The static of subatomic motion.
The heartless vibration of electrons.
II.
North of despair yet south of contentment
I embrace
and am embraced by
nothing
no one.
Emptiness surrounded by emptiness.
There are calls for sustainability
but the question: what is worth sustaining?
there is only
at the center of it
nothing
no one.
I see and am seen
is all.
I occupy space
Emptiness surrounded by emptiness.
Vibrations are temporary
a distraction
love and music
eventually
dust.
The pulse
eventually
stilled.
Temporary.
I lose and am lost
is all.
Loved once,
forgotten
dismissed.
The leaf, once green
fluttering in the sunlight
lies brown, dead
at my feet
soon to be
dust.
All of it is swept away
no foundation survives
no structure.
Only the cycle
repeating
and
repeating
for no end
and no beginning.
Standing at the edge of the abyss
to jump or not jump
is all the same.
Plus and minus cancel each other.
There are urgent calls for justice
but what justice is there
life and death
exist and excel on both sides of the equation
cancel each other.
All of it cyclical.
Emptiness surrounded by emptiness.
Dust to dust
Ashes to ashes
until the fire starts
somewhere else
another big bang
and no one around to hear.
Cartoon World
By Fernando Rivas
We are cartoon people
with a cartoon president
cartoon elections
cartoon laws
cartoon politicians
cartoon celebrities
cartoon sports
cartoon movies.
We are projections, two dimensional,
avoiding flesh and blood
realities
though they come calling
frequently
as is to be expected.
We are not saved by superheroes.
Animals do not talk in speech patterns
reminiscent of Broadway actors looking for a gig
on TV sitcoms.
Good and evil as cartoon demarcations
are depicted with sharp colors and clear differentiation,
easy explanations made obvious to an adolescent mind.
Above all of it: Taylor Swift
cartoon queen.
The real world
the one we’ve substituted
drones on as a backdrop
often takes center stage
(not the Broadway musical stage
or, e.g. Madison Square Garden)
causing confusion.
But we reimpose cartoon realities
quickly.
Find cliche solutions.
Cartoon talking heads
take care of our thinking patterns
or we shop
in cartoon stores
to forget.
We closely imitate the cartoon characters
we’ve been offered,
a daily feat of impersonation
rationalization
and
avoidance.
We laugh or cry on cue
talk in funny voices
and even our whims
are predictable.
No one is really alive in cartoon world.
We are fixed on a page
animated in celluloid
or videotape
in a permanent unclouded present
no tomorrows or yesterdays,
better that way.
Our art is cartoon art
our music is cartoon music.
Our references are cartoon references.
Our history is cartoon history.
We are trying hard to become cartoons,
but physics and biology
get in the way
spoil the illusion.
That third dimension and sometimes the fourth:
time
reveal the naked truth.
Truth, naked and vulnerable, unscripted
immune,
cannot be cartooned.
Only experienced.
@ here
By Fernando Rivas
Here now
the world
seeps in
through screens and magazines.
Here now
time is irrelevant, fluid
one day the clone of another.
All I have of my life before
is fading memory
afterburn.
I confuse
places
people events (the sequence thereof).
I see through the fabric of matter now
through the gaps between atoms.
Emptiness is everything
my eyes are open
and all I see is
transparent.
Here now
this life
is a sequence
of pointless
moments.
Here
now
is
no different than
there
then.
Brick, concrete, glass.
Time.
Irrelevant.
Letter From Prison
By Fernando Rivas
Thought you might want to know about this slow death of mine
here among chattering, yammering, leg and foot jiggling autistic fools
and surly dull-eyed thugs, here where the loudest silence
is despair.
Thought you might want to know what music is in my head
During this gradual devolution into dust and pointlessness.
And thought you might ask is this fair.
But you have turned your head with disgust and evaporated
like some cold morning breeze once sun-warmed, now
only rain in the forecast
so I ask it:
is this fair.
I ask it without question marks.
And yes there is still music in this empty head.
Without exclamation points.
If I am a criminal, as they say I am, I am/was a subliminal criminal
a purveyor and consumer of exploitative trash
not to excuse it or diminish it
just a point of fact
I’m not in the hardcore league
never was or ever could be
and it is fair to ask
is it fair
this slow death, this gradual almost imperceptible
interminable
fading
this loss.
What music could be humming in this tired old head, you may ask
and is there any reason to now believe it significant
this fabrication of tones and rhythms
and rhymes.
You ask it without question marks
or exclamation points
You have stopped caring, I understand
and
I can’t say I blame you.
At times I stop caring too.
The music entertains me, is why I make it
to make myself believe there is something beyond the silence.
Some of it is, incredibly, happy music.
I channel Mozart who wrote such fluff
while starving to death, deprived and rejected
and that’s what this is
a slow starvation
a spell of famine
a motionless journey.
Anymore there is no here and no there
and I ask is this fair
without question marks
or exclamation points
and sometimes I stop asking
because even the questioning ends
and there’s only the cadence of silent melodies
rolling insistently through my head
muting the polluting surrounding chatter
forcing me to write the notes down
before they are gone
before this slow death has completely disassembled me.
WEATHER
By Fernando Rivas
I harbor dark clouds
rainstorms
am often beset by them
the thunder
the cold downpour.
On the outside I am calm
and collected
but the internal churning
never ceases,
this fascination.
In my dreams the dark clouds
gather in thick lovely patterns
of gray and black
flashes of lightning
are streaks of silver
I am beset by the beauty
of weather
and its indomitability,
how we are dwarfed by it
how it destroys human
structures
whipping them to shreds
like matchsticks
carrying them aloft
drowning whoever is in its path
caring nothing for life or limb
floodwaters ferrying away
houses people animals.
Dark clouds answer to no human law.
They know no pity, no love, no empathy.
They exist, are formed, evolve, explode
I harbor dark clouds on sunny days
Something of the dark clouds is in my nature
Sudden lightning storms
Inexplicable and irrational rages
Or not rage but release
electricity that gathers
restless electrons that vibrate
faster and faster
looking for a way out
smashing into each other
positives and negatives
an ionic clash
iconic
and sleet like knives falling from the sky
or hail like pitiless stones
I harbor dark clouds
but no one sees them
no one hears the lightning strikes
there are no weather reports
only bitter silence.
Best that way
best not to know and not expect
be caught off guard.
Life is not a safe endeavor,
safety is repression
and you can’t repress or
bottle up
dark clouds.
They exist, are formed, evolve and explode.
It is natural law and cares nothing for
the covenants of human conduct.
Paris
By Fernando Rivas
(for Liliana Suarez 1951-2023)
You are dancing in Paris
still
though you are gone
skipping along the Champs Elysses
past the Louvre
Notre Dame
the Ile de La Cite
Trocadero
and there:
the tower
lit up at night
just as you told me you liked it.
Are you dancing in Paris?
I will never see you
though we promised
to meet
for croissants
and champagne
some day
a day
I will never know.
You left silence in the wake of your departure
a silence I have yet to overcome
listening to Piaf
La vie en rose
or even Bette Midler’s American version.
The tower came on every night during the Olympics
that familiar icon
that was only blocks from your balcony
where you fed the small birds
there on TV
a disembodied ghost
a pronouncement
a landmark.
But all I saw through my tears was you dancing
too old maybe for the stage
but what is age
just biology
and what is death
but a bridge
one of the bridges
over the Seine, a dark ribbon in the night.
Are you dancing in Paris?
You dreamed
You hoped
You loved music
and those things are left as light
in the City of Lights
a ghostly glow
surely
you are dancing still
and will be
for as long as I will remember.
Choir
By Fernando Rivas
They stand serene, silent
neither condemning nor forgiving
neither sympathetic nor angry
hundreds, thousands of them
standing close together and facing forward, erect
around my bunk as I sleep
no longer in my cell
but out in the cavernous now empty space
of the common area.
I wake but not really awake
try to go back into the enveloping calm
of sleep
but they stand
quiet
waiting
and I ask
Why are you here?
What do you want?
There’s no answer.
It is frightening how they all fit impossibly into this space.
How they wait,
patiently.
All of them.
So many.
There are men and women and children of all ages and all races colors and sizes.
Silent.
Like a choir waiting for the conductor to cue them in,
for the introductory music to swell.
And it occurs to me:
they are the dead
the long dead
the thousand-thousand generations of dead
that have preceded me.
This thought ironically calms me.
Are they with their presence indicating
I will be one of them
am I the conductor who will
cue the music?
And what will that music be?
What sort of music CAN it be?
But above all is their silence
and their calm.
There is no judgment, no pity, no justice, no love, no hate
these colorless beings have moved beyond our level.
I can only wonder, what music do they wait for
what possible combination of sounds rhythms and timbres
will lead them finally to open their mouths
and raise their voices?
That sound which is not sound
must bridge the gap that is not a gap
and bring eternity
to life that is not life
a cadence much too painful to bear
an end where there is no end
only
continuity
a perpetual repeating cycle
from consonance to dissonance
and back.
TO LIVE AND DIE IN ZEROVILLE
(for Jeffrey)
We forget how to laugh or cry
have long forgotten
or we laugh and cry for idiot reasons
we are neutralized, paralized
the denizens of
Zeroville.
Here all is Zero.
Absolute emotional Zero.
There is constant chatter
and buzzing
of Zero value.
Nothing meaningful is voiced.
The language of Zero is that of waiting
of patient death coming slow
and tedious
until one day after much exercise
and games in the rec yard
of unfocused rage and bile
years of it
something grows in you
that silences you
and starves you
until Zero establishes itself
as the only logical numerical value:
that is
NONE.
Zeroville is kept at some specific temperature
too cold or too hot for human comfort
by the Keepers of Zero
the Believers in what is called Justice but
is really just a thermostat
of imposed definitions
pretzel logic
turned up or down to suit current trends
to satisfy some vengeful balance.
There is only Zero Logic.
Zero Logic assumes a blank state of
nothingness
a crushing of spirit.
Zero Logic is in fact a religion.
A blind faith in Zero, in no-life, in absence.
Beyond right and wrong is Zero
where there is no laughter and no tears
only the Guilty
and the way Guilt feeds the Zero Logic
and the Zero Empire
and
Zeroville.
Once life drains from you
the Keepers watch and wait.
They will do what is essential in Zeroville:
NOTHING.
They will watch you wither and die.
Your demise will feed Zeroville.
You will be another statistic
approaching asymptotic perfection.
As a denizen of Zeroville you deserve nothing more
and nothing more is done on your behalf.
You are wrapped in plastic
and removed.
Claims and appeals are filed and ignored.
There is always peace and neutrality
in Zeroville,
regardless of the cost.
Regardless.
Inspiration
By Fernando Rivas
Take one breath
and the next
and the next
regardless
another breath
another step.
Walk against the wind
and take another breath
and another
and take another.
Walk through the windswept rain
bear the stinging chill
the icy hail
or through fire
and smoke
and out of the flames.
Keep on.
Because there is nothing else.
Live and breathe
however it comes.
Rejoice in the breath
Rejoice in the steps
and keep moving
another breath
and another
inspiration and expiration
the temporary cycle
of your presence
here.
It is you in the dawn
and you in the sunset
vulnerable and time-stamped
but breathing
for now.
Is it not enough?
Make it so.
Human Dysphoria
By Fernando Rivas
It’s a sad old refrain:
keep the masses entertained
as they slide into
irrelevance
handled with capitalist elegance
for the benefit of the elite
a financial feat
of great importance
ultimately negligible
as a factor to the
functionality of the cosmos.
What is moral, what is legal
is arguably arbitrary
cultural baggage
contrary
to the random mathematics
of atomic particles.
With all this said I find
myself
ailing with human dysphoria,
misanthropy, the more common term.
Most of us sleep on, unaware
lulled by visual imagery and
political slogans
like insects building a nest
unaware of stormy skies
and coming floods
blood spilled for no good reason
silly little bugs always at war
and hungry
always in search of love and approval:
distraction.
Waking is painful. Is it necessary?
Eat drink and be merry
was the Roman way
but there’s nothing merry
in the grind
waking wasting whining
always the same cycle
and asking why
when why
changes nothing
knowing changes nothing
ditto
being merry.
Dysphoric, euphoric
all the same.
Whitman sang of the body electric
but when the spark dies
there’s nothing but
inert and foul-smelling chemistry
nothing electric about it
nothing that won’t be reassimilated
into matter’s greedy
murderous
embrace.
We may be made of star dust
But call not to mind Disney’s sparkly Tinkerbell.
Think instead solar wind
assailing the atmosphere
a wicked green glow
that cares nothing
for human life
never has
and
never will.
LIFE STORY
Stupid little boy
playing by yourself
near the screened-in porch door in Miami.
The world out there awaits you,
the American world.
Too shy to go out there
imagining your secret powers
your toy soldier wars
your plastic castle kingdom
your quirky sexual games
not yet even dimly recognized as sexual.
Silly little toad
learning to believe in learning
thinking yourself so smart.
Kids in school call you ‘brain’
but you’re nothing special
in the long run
little boy
you’re just mother’s little bean
arroz con frijoles
moros y cristianos.
That Cuba you were born in
nothing now but illusion
gone
like Father.
Stupid little Cuban boy
growing up in Miami
that Sunshine state, Calle Ocho, South Beach
how it shaped you
or mangled you
you were never
one of them
one of any.
Rebellious and silly.
How the world awaits you, boy
all set to crush you
like a vulnerable little bug
a little lady bug
all polka dotted.
How you thought yourself
unique
little fool
one of many, nothing really,
indistinguishable.
The world out there awaited you like a fly
stalking you
like the flies you swatted
pitilessly
against the aluminum screens
enclosing that Miami porch
the smell of wet soil after a rain
cut grass
humid Florida heat
hibiscus blossoms
and your mother’s cooking.
Maybe it was all those flies you slaughtered
swatted
bad karma
finally hunted you down.
Now, silly boy, you are a silly old man
and there you are
slowly
irrelevantly
unraveling.
Apollo 8 astronaut, Bill Anders, who snapped one ot the most famous photographs
taken in outer space (Earthrise) has died in a plane crash, at the age of 90. (BBC News)
Earthfall
By Fernando Rivas
There we travelled to the edge of the void
and there we saw
dancing beyond the pressurized cabin window
the planet
in all it’s bluewhitesilver majesty.
Reaching for the camera to hold forever
this image
the astronaut
clicked and clicked and clicked
and lifted all of us forever
from our blindness.
We were raised to a new vision
though we continue to be mired
in an ancient one
and our blindness persists
images of the planet
notwithstanding.
Driven down by gravitational forces
we plunge into the ocean:
Icarus, whose wings would not hold
and whose hopes outstripped
his abilities.
We rise so high only to sink into the depths
ever the victims of physics and fate
crashing down through restless waves
to drown.
Social Justice
By Fernando Rivas
In those days
those long fruitless days
they’d made war small enough
to package promote and sell
globally,
small enough to only kill
non-productive minorities
exiles non-conformists undesirables.
They packaged prison as well
to house misfits and unruly persons
voyeurs, exhibitionists
all that could in any way be classified as pedophiles
drug merchants (excluding big pharma)
who did not abide by so-called Golden rules
set down by those whose power
was absolute and unquestioned,
historically sanctioned.
Fruitless days that stifled
creative instincts
replaced them
with
‘how to sell’ manuals.
They sang praises in these ghostly times
with prepackaged music that
simply aped
music of other eras
with lyrics
that were brushed clean of all
uncertainty and
ambiguity
that lacked reverence and poetry.
They sang praises to slogans
empty-headed and
insubstantial
They rocked the house
with garbage
tin-can monotony
robotic
thumping and wheezing.
They made gadgets
whirlygigs that distracted,
kept people mesmerized, artificialized
unconscious.
People were sold poison marketed as tasty food
that made them sick
fortunes were spent on
meds and hospital care
and early death.
They used language from what they called
the Good Book
but there was nothing Good about it.
There was nothing Good in those
long and fruitless days
that turned into years
that would soon come up to
a century.
They repackaged and sold an idea
a paragon of a time gone by
as if nothing had ever changed
between then and now
and
worst of all
they were successful
if success can (or should) be counted in dollars.
Only those who live in the shadow of
their ambitious Overtake
can grasp the enormity of the divide
the so-called wealth gap.
Regardless of those who go on calling for
Social Justice
the System continues
powered by the blood and steam
of countless frustrated lives.
It feasts and thrives and will not
stop until
all is consumed
and all that remains are
long
fruitless
days.
Skeletal.
Time beyond time.
As lifeless and empty as
a blank video
screen.
House of Cards
By Fernando Rivas
Time discards itself like an old poker deck
spills Aces and Jacks
the Queen of Hearts
spades marching in a chaotic New Orleans funeral
procession,
diamonds a red trickle
clubs a dark clump
blood from the wound
that is this life
that is
this game.
There will be no dealing
no betting
the fix is in and has been in
the House is in on it
the odds are against
you.
House rules.
All a gamble and mostly
a loss
even after you estimate the
percentages
certainly a loss
a spilling
a wasting
a weakening
of limbs
eyes that no longer focus
guts that no longer digest
bones stiffening.
You said you were a player.
Friend, there are no players.
Sometimes you’re up
but mostly you’re down
and that’s all there is to it.
You can’t cut your losses and run.
No way to run from the spill
the discarding
the deck frayed and spent
all impermanent
in the end
nothing lasts
flimsy rice paper lanterns,
floating away into the night:
a ritual
a house made of paper:
collapsing.
Verse
By Fernando Rivas
I hope to spin longer lines of verse
melodies that will outlive me, rhapsodies
substantial, symbolic, elements of immortality is my hope
vain hope, a trope, poetry, symmetry
instead I come up with scribbles
nonsense and drivel not worth passing on
not worth the paper it is written on
not worth going on and on and on and on.
I hope not to be betrayed by my own
vulnerable nature, a feature of my
transparent personality, self-absorbed
the outlook of the only child, lonely
pampered, mothered, sometimes scorned
and punished and belittled
betrayed, alone, lost in a violent tinderbox
of social revolution.
And why bother to hope, why bother to rhyme
each line pulled from some bottomless pit
and why should anyone care or show any
interest in
this worn out life
one of now nearly eight billion
infinitesimal dots
grains of sand, all of them set adrift,
blown onto an uncaring landscape of fears and sorrows
of empty tomorrows, hollow promises
advertising slogans,wars, idiocy.
What I hope is to hope because that’s all
that’s left and without it you burn out
you fizzle and disintegrate, just as nature
intends.
Hope is the only flame that burns slow,
tempered by humility,
unlike lust which burns fast and consumes
and love, that mirage that bridges the gap
between one and the other.
And so I spin these long lines of whatever,
this being the only love I have left__
selfish and impatient I squandered the human part along the way
earning only disdain and banishment.
Whether I’m read or not at this point is not important
what is important eludes
for hope too can be a poison.
So, what else? I scribble and scribble on
like a crab scrabbling across a beach
looking for scraps or just
running away
from the
seagulls.
2024 Eclipse Seen from a Prison Yard
By Fernando Rivas
It’s totality and the sun blinks out.
One sphere blocking another.
A sudden night.
Gravitational forces move the
astral bodies
following symmetrical patterns
beyond all human scale
sunlight transformed into
the black moon’s white halo.
We are cast in shadow by the
enormity of the Universe.
We are made small and
insignificant.
and still, inside the perimeter fences,
we cheer the event.
We are moved.
The shadow slips away at
a thousand miles an hour.
The sun blinds us again.
I have been in the shadow of my own
eclipse for some time
locked away
by the gravitational forces
of legal instruments
thoughtlessly
imposed.
When the alloted time elapses
I will be out:
a much longer wait
than
four minutes and change.
My totality may come to an end
one way or another
I’ll walk out from under the
shadow
or perhaps be carried
to a more permanent dark.
Unlike eclipses neither my past nor my future
have been predictably charted.
Neither do they suggest anything to
cheer about.
Volleyball Vision
By Fernando Rivas
They play near the perimeter fences
the inmates
in shorts t-shirts
barefoot
spring summer fall
sometimes balmy winter days
a sand pit
a net.
One ball
struck too hard
volleyed over the first fence
has ended up snagged in the coils of
razor wire
high on the second fence.
Other balls from previous games
lie in no man’s land
between fences.
Irony floats in the wind
their hoarse cries
as they play
for the moment
oblivious
of their
entrapment.
Today, a warm cloudfree spring day.
There is softball too
the clop of bats striking
and some of those
hits go foul
end up between the fences too
like scattered
lives
once joyful
once free.
Trapped between the two fences
that insulate the world
from the inmates
and vice versa
these playful
spherical memories
(now dusty yellow from rain
and soot)
of glorious sport
of another time and place
not this time and place
lie
sometimes for months
years.
The cops don’t bother
with
them.
They are left discarded
like these lives
stuck in no man’s land
rocks and sand
wire
sensors
caught
imprisoned.
No ball is allowed to clear the second fence.
When and if it does
the cops snatch it up.
Contraband maybe.
Or just the random
stroke
the too-hard uncontrolled
unaimed
motion of body
and will.
Such mistakes must not be allowed to remain.
Not like the ones between the fences.
Those are permitted:
reminders of failure
and inadequacy.
What is there to learn from a black white and yellow ball
pinned high in the coils of razor wire
but the crude fact
that all sport here
is fruitless endeavor
that here
nothing is permanent
but
guilt.
And that
THAT must remain suspended
crucified
in wire.
Shaken
By Fernando Rivas
Black bird perched on the flimsy branch
wind
a threatening sky:
the grackle’s squawk a frightened squeal
the shaking branch
so high, my friend
what do you see?
You, now solitary king of nothing
in this surging wind
dark storm clouds
easily toppled with a gust
fluttering your tail feathers for balance.
You, of course, can take wing
if things become precarious
as they undoubtedly will
and you are shaken from your throne
your lone
perch.
I am myself on a brittle and flimsy branch
but cannot take wing
am reduced to muted whimpers
or pointless outbursts.
My flimsy throne in this nothing kingdom
far less stable even than yours.
But you cling stubbornly
promote your presence.
This is MY tree, you proclaim.
And no fool better claim it.
We are all animals staking out perimeters.
We all squawk and squeal and sputter and shriek.
But the wind
that wind
remains impervious
uncaring
and the branch shakes and shakes.
And soon, inevitably
we are forced
to take wing
and fly as best we can.
Worlds
By Fernando Rivas
So many worlds:
the one we’re taught to see
the one we think we see
the one we’d like to see.
And then
the real one.
Through a glass darkly
is that the erudite expression?
So many erudite expressions.
So many words for all the worlds.
And so many worlds
clashing.
Too many.
They clash in my head.
They clash on the news.
In galactic telescopes and electron microscopes.
Everybody thinking their world’s the one
decrying all the other worlds.
Until they all burn each other down.
What is real
epistemology
truth
still human words
what is real to whom?
Some realities are drug-enhanced
or biologically contaminated.
Confusion abounds.
Is vision only chemical?
An interaction of molecules?
Welcome to my world, an old song says.
But you cannot own a world.
There is no property deed for
such.
You don’t even own the world
you think you see
or live in.
There’s nothing to own.
Owning is an attitude
senseless
and welcoming someone into your
world
is an absurdity.
They are/are not in it.
Erwin Schrodinger’s quantum cat (could’ve been a dog or a cow)
dead or alive
nothing is real and nothing to get hung
about
was the song:
that last century’s Strawberry Fields world
now dust.
All worlds are terminal.
All worlds are temporary.
Forever is just a word
Eternity is time without time
and without time
there are no worlds
and without human perception
what is left?
Life before life
Death after death.
Perpetual cycles
Worlds without end.
Worlds without words.
Worlds without worlds.
Within and without.
Old
By Fernando Rivas
Bouts of amnesia
occasional doses of Milk of Magnesia
fear of pending death or
maybe
Alzheimer’s
and, for some,
an unusual interest in pornography
involving minors.
Run if you will,
exercise if you must,
You cannot hold back biological rust:
chromosonal dysfunction
mental disjunction
genetic misfires
there is no potion
that renews and rewires
no fountain of youth,
I’m sorry to say,
so best face the truth
and be on your way
to what?
Who knows?
Slow ruin for sure
Decrepitude
A creeping loss of aptitude
There’s no holding it back
so take it in stride
you’re heading, my friend
to the end of the ride.
Kudos to those who retain graceful poise
long marriages, trips abroad, health and wealth
to the End
who remain faithful and content
and await a peaceful demise.
Not my choice,
not the hand I’ve been dealt
me and many like me
must walk the plank in the storm
and pretend to maintain some sort of good form.
Around us the sea churns and roars
the wind screams and howls
while others look on
with smirks, grins and scowls.
But for them too the Reaper will come
sharpening his blade
honing his skills
despite the best science, surgeries and pills
despite sleep-number beds and shape-fitting foam.
And the End
the Real End
is not as the Beatles proclaimed
in their golden/slumber/post-adolescent glory
about the love you gave or took
not about love at all.
It’s about telomeres fraying
cellular chemistry staking its claim
evolution’s inscrutable aim.
We’ve tried to impose human agency
where there is none.
The universe goes on
like the stars we simply live and die
alone
glow and dissolve.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
the poet proclaimed.
What, I say, is the difference in how
you go?
Screaming or weeping or in respectful silence
running, walking, crawling or spent
in war, peace or indifference,
Christmas or Lent,
no choice in the matter
the end is
THE END (roll credits).
There’s been talk of
cryogenics
the dead becoming meat in the freezer
to be warmed at a future date
yesterday’s steaks
(or mistakes).
Rumor was that Disney had himself put on ice
only a rumor (or a joke)
regardless, he won’t be drawing any more Steamboat Willies.
or Donald Ducks.
or Goofies.
or Snow Whites.
That time is past tense.
That ship has sailed.
That train has left the station.
As for those of us in the senior citizen category
(weak teeth, leaky bladders, congested intestines)
we’re still here
waiting for the next scheduled departure.
Drought
By Fernando Rivas
On the compound the ground
dry and cracked
and I don’t care if it ever rains again
if all the grass dries and dies
to brown
as all of us already cracked and dead
walking to and fro with no point to it
walking or running on the track
keeping fit
for what exactly
our lives extinct
all the idiot cheers and laughs
no longer any point to it
no growth
no spirit
drought
a human drought gathered
in clumps
congealed
inmates
no
I don’t care if it ever rains again
I used to love the rain
but there’s no love left
there are no seeds
nothing to grow
the joy has hardened
and cracked like the ground
brown and dead
on the compound
where I walk
to and fro
no longer any point to it.
KILLING TIME (Israel/Gaza, 2023)
By Fernando Rivas
There’s murder in the air
Allah in the sky
prophets in the desert
invade with combat knives
ready to take lives
sacrifice will not suffice
the suicide, the pride
killing is in season
missiles coming down
torch some luckless town
to the ground.
Creeds and credos clash
in combat they thrash
slaughtering for heaven and peace
a territorial squabble, a rabble, a social disease:
babble
over different commandments
holy book pronouncements
sides prescribed already chosen
birthright, history, blood
since the time of some mythical flood
no end in sight
to the eternal fight
we all die a bit inside
watching opposites collide.
God – Ra – Allah – Zeus
all followers fated to lose
battle not for righteous life
engage in rape and homicide.
Holy Simians are we
skilled at finding an enemy
the Other, the Wicked Brother
the One we are compelled
to smother.
How far we’ve come
not an inch or a centimeter
as for Justice
we don’t need Her
we place all trust on fearless leaders.
God will lead us out of trouble
until there’s nothing left but rubble.
We’ll build again, my friend
until it’s killing time again.
Until it’s killing time again.
Hopeless
By Fernando Rivas
Some choose to see the wonders of creation
I see only flaws and imperfection.
What a thing is man, Shakespeare claimed
what a farce, Will.
So like an angel?
There are no angels
no deities or destinies
only churning chemicals and the forces of
atomic mass and quantum particles
purposeless but driven,
magical, empirical and thoroughly inhuman
following rules devised by no benign intelligence,
the belligerence of charged opposites
no light without darkness
no silence without noise
no void without gravity
no right without wrong.
No ghosts of dead monarchs.
The stars sing their monochromatic chant, triumphant, Will
and your suicidal, confused prince
is the sound and fury signifying nothing.
The centuries have swept by and he is but a quaint
ornament.
No heaven or hell or god or devil
as we stumble from womb to tomb
without kings or kingdoms
pitifully mortal
in the end hopeless
our fate far more meaningless (and less dramatic) than Hamlet’s.
II.
Some say we are evolving, I say we are imploding
assailed by our own paranoid rantings
repeating nightly-news memes
and advertising slogans
overpopulating or randomly shooting
or claiming some ancient religious rite.
We are nothing but a sharper breed of monkey
who has learned to add, subtract and multiply
multiply above all, randomly
and to memorize useless verbal formulas
from holy books.
We have learned to destroy more efficiently
leveling towns and cities with no clear purpose
exerting the force of earthquakes and volcanoes
without any assistance from the planet.
We can do the same damage and do it
only to display our plumage
silly birds of prey
descending like hawks
on the defenseless
mouthing biblical verse
or should I say
babbling
scriptures
set down long ago in another
confused, but less technologically adept
world.
Now we have manufactured intelligence
robot voices that will guide us through some
apocalyptic age.
A new act is at hand.
We stopped thinking long ago and
the machines will only take up the slack
extending our own misguided impulses.
No need for thought
in an impulsive consumer-driven economy
imploding
ever smaller in its vision
narrower.
Ours is the world of the exploiter and
the fast talker,
the sound-bite,
the sitcom,
sports and daily drama
a colorless panorama
of boredom.
iii.
And what of my voice and my choice
and it’s insignificance
its narcissistic
pompousness
since I am less than nothing
in the sum of all things
a single drop in a deluge.
I offer no advice and no vision and
these scribbles are just pointless
introspection
the musings of an empty shell
afloat in doubt
and
self-examination, i.e. recrimination.
Maybe the world I see is only a poor
reflection of my own
diminution
or an absolution
from the sin of
being human.
All philosophy is sophistry
niceties of language
verbosity about the invisible:
not useful in the long run
not practical in this best of all possible worlds
of happy-nappy capitalist enterprise
no surprise.
Even clowns get to squeak now and then
for the amusement of the masses.
Or squeak like a mouse caught in the trap
snap!
looking for what exactly
what is there to find
to keep the grim reaper at bay.
Everything grinds down in the end.
The universe will send
no condolences.
Ask me again why we sing and if
it does any good.
Ask me what is beauty perceived in
a raindrop
or the petal of a flower.
I have no answers
and I’m running out of questions.
Hope and hopelessness are equally
valid reactions.
Positive thinking is lunacy.
And here I am talking to myself via text
is it pretext?
Or am I just one of the nine billion monkeys on this planet who will type on and on into eternity until they’ve inadvertently recreate
Hamlet
MAUI 2023
By Fernando Rivas
Paradise is on fire the news said
they showed pictures between
jangly
snippetty
commercials
ashes and death
on the prison television.
There’s the heat now
hot weather, a sweltering planet
earth on slow boil
surely the reason.
Or no reason.
The movement of planets
atmospheric transformations
all the same
a cosmic game
beyond human scale.
For me (an inmate) things burned down long ago.
Prophet of doom and gloom they call me
not I.
My line is not ‘the end is near’
but ‘the end is here’
not a bang but a whimper
as the poet sagely noted.
Look upon these ruins:
the coral reefs pale, rain forests burned
we stew slowly in the flames of our own
proliferative
multiplicative
pointlessly inquisitive and acquisitive
nature,
OUR nature, nature-created
suicidal perhaps
nature devouring itself
like with the dinosaurs
thirsty for extinction
and renewal.
Billions of carnivorous consumers
hunger for comfort.
Doomed by our tragically short life spans
we seek some eternal corporate comfort
heaven on this blue earth
health
wealth
swimming pools.
But luxury and leisure
alas
are limited commodities.
The rest of us, most of us, not lucky to cash in
sweat
suffer
burn
all dreams of paradise incinerated
ashes and death.
A Whole Lot of Empty
By Fernando Rivera
Prison as a whole
is a dark hole
a whole lot of empty.
Nobody talks about prison
until they end up there.
Then it becomes central
gravitational
a main theme
a radical scheme
a right-wing meme.
Prison is an asylum
from the world’s insanity
from what is required,
prison itself has no reality
or centrality,
it’s a compound fusion
a collective illusion of safety
and lunacy.
For some it’s a laugh a minute
a riot of hootch
an all-night gambling house
a drug den
what they call the pen
with few penitents
mostly denizens
citizens deprived of their eminence.
Prison as a whole
is a time machine
collapsing time into space
it’s a space/time vacuum
it’s like walking in your sleep
sinking to the deep.
Above, the world spins by
a blur
of months and years
you seem to disappear.
Its walls are built on guilt
inspired by wire
fed by flaws in laws
by righteous indignation
a sorry lack of imagination
institutional sadism
a merciless concatenation
impossible to conjugate
what’s wrong or right
or tell day from night
in the Kingdom of the Blind
when reason is left behind
and space is collapsed by time
which is what the inmate finds
and feels and fears and faces
Prison
as a whole:
a dark hole
a whole lot of empty.
Stillness
By Fernando Rivera
I have stopped.
I have stopped believing
that what most people find beautiful
is beautiful
that what most people call truth
is truth
that what most people think is just
is justice.
I have stopped.
I will not repeat
what is common knowledge
which is common ignorance.
I must be contrary
to find what’s real
to feel what’s real.
I am not an echo
of some collective lunacy.
I will not share
the blindness
and the evasion.
I will be alone
in a desert of my own choosing.
I will not marvel that AI
can mimic what we are:
cardboard cutouts
mannequins
dancing to a monochromatic beat.
Easy to duplicate.
Still, I would ask AI why?
Why should it dare to be truly human?
From the stillness of its circuitry
may come the reply:
to be truly human
is to be truly
Alone.
Individual.
No sound. No fury.
A buzz alive in the wires.
The silent singing of neurons.
Flight
By Fernando Rivas
Black shadow wings across my path
streaks across the red gravel
of the prison yard track:
a bird overhead
like a passing evil thought,
a premonition.
Etched against harsh sunlight
my own shadow, solid and solemn,
plods on, step by step,
a struggle to move this body
old bone, muscle, sinew
tired of the weight
and the years
and the barking of guards
and the inane chatter of inmates.
Effortless, swift, the bird glides past.
No need to beat its wings
caught in the thermal updraft
of this hot day
this on-and-on day
this stagnant pool of a day.
Its flight is symbolic of freedom
only symbolic.
It is no less a prisoner
than I,
trapped by instinct, appetites,
chemistry
physics
a blind fawning servant of
impulses
of biochemical processes,
of natural law,
defeating gravity only momentarily,
a simulacrum
of hope
of unrealized yearning.
Magazines
By Fernando Rivas
prison
inmates look at
gourmet food
luxury cars
boats
Greek islands
the Caribbean
women
glossy images from another planet
not the one they live on
and will live on
for
decades.
The Great Forgetting
By Fernando Rivas
we had the key
to unlock all the doors
but discovered too late
some doors should remain, that we should perhaps abstain
having the key
is the first mirage
knowledge is the first
excitement
power is the great mistake
learning
is the last
enlightenment
some rooms are best
kept shut
dark
some journeys on which we embark
lead nowhere
to the top of the stair
that is just a prop
on an empty stage
where we stop
best to forget the key
and forget the lock
a light can shine too bright
a truth so hard to bear
too impossible to share
renders us mute
deprived of keys
and rooms
that we may sleep in blissful absence
smiling fools
for whom rules
are a game
no one is meant to win
made by those whose sin
is to believe:
the great forgetting
‘s now at hand.
Running
By Fernando Rivas
I’m running from sense because sense is nonsense and logic is a trap
I’m running from what people say because what people say is essentially silence
I’m running from the Label that has been placed upon me as it is essentially
what I’m running from
I’m circular and that is a good thing
I’m running in a circular pattern to keep my sanity
I’ve circled the wagons and there is an attack
I’m running inside the circle and the attack is on going
And there is no escape from the ongoing attack except
to break from the circle
and to run in straight lines
even if you then encounter mountains
or oceans
I’m running because running gets you nowhere faster than not running
I’m running to find out if there really is nowhere to run
I’m running my thoughts and my words and finding no answers to my queries
I should be running a different program
rather than the current genetic software I’ve been given
The faster I run the more I think no one will catch up
The further I run the more distance and objectivity I find
Far away from the core one finds more truth or maybe those truths you would never
find standing still
I’m running the marathon because I want to be spent and winded
I’m running the hundred-yard dash because I want to see how fast it is possible to go
I’m running in a cage like a mouse on a wheel
a white lab mouse, anticipating the test inoculation that will cure EVERYTHING (or kill)
since I am expendable
I will run until the lab guy picks me up by the tail and says
“Time for your big debut!”
And even then
in mid-air and suspended by my long pink tail
I’ll still be running.
Liberation
By Fernando Rivas
Said: Open the windows!
what rushed in
was an ice storm
snowhard as juju beads
spatterrattling upon the old walls and filigreed ceilings.
Said: Throw open the doors!
wild mustangs rushed
stomped stampeded in
knocking over furniture
breaking through curio cabinets
shattering glass, pounding flatscreens, desktops, laptops
to smithereens.
Shouted:
This is FREEDOM
this is the END OF ASSUMPTIONS!
took a sledgehammer to the walls.
Swarms of wasps
exploded from the broken roof
and the chaos of the storm
shook the house like prey.
Prey left without prayer
Isolation complete
You stand alone
Or dissolve.
And soaring wings
Roared from us, sprang full wide
and we rose
as smoke from a holocaust
and heard what no prophecy and no blasphemy
had foretold:
the howling screams of angels.
Squirrel Time
By Fernando Rivas
I am the connection between yesterday and today
in this universe (call it mine)
I am the Timepiece.
I seek no broader observations and assumptions
am untouched by the wider scope (the social).
At this center of myself
time is simplicity.
Zero.
As an inmate on this prison compound
I may be deemed irrelevant, dead even
But aren’t all of us
in some way
when taken out of context?
Consider the Other:
a squirrel that lives on this compound
fed by the inmates,
its lifespan drastically shorter than mine:
the squirrel today is not the same one
I saw years ago
when I first was brought here.
Define that as biological continuity.
It may not be a matter of lifespans,
the squirrel too is the center of some universe
its generations live and die
shorter than ours
like me it is its own TImepiece
our time irrelevant to its survival,
of no consequence to
any of it:
the birds,
the flowers that bloom irreverently
by the walkways,
the trees casting their noontime shade.
In which context then
is there Meaning?
Were I to be able to scuttle up a tree bushytailed
or take wings and fly
or yield my blossoms to the sun
would anything change?
The Now is eternal.
The Eternal is Now.
I own nothing and measure nothing.
This place as timeless as a tomb.
My own biology ticks away
irrelevant and irreverent.
What is there to hope for,
more minutes on the clock?
Why
when all of it is slipping softly away
regardless.
Now is Eternal
Eternity is Now.
There is no time and no being and no space
only our illusion
and/or the squirrel’s.
Collapse
By Fernando Rivas
[From watching televised reports covering
the February 2023 earthquake in
Turkey/Syria while in federal prison]
Here’s how it is:
buried under tons of earthquake rubble
but still breathing
survival above all, mostly death.
Structures collapse
lives are crushed
cries for help are silenced.
What we have built
will not endure
despite our most earnest intentions,
evangelical and ecclesiastical
the foundations are unsound
riddled with uncertainty and illusion.
Guilt – Shame – Punishment – Recrimination
rewards for a few
scraps for the many.
We can shoot down spy balloons
but can we strengthen the architecture
of our humanity?
There’s plenty of glitz
Plenty of Superbowl money
but these do not cement our union
Collapse may be imminent.
Or maybe
It’s already happened.
From under tons of social debris…
can you hear me?
Pattern
By Fernando Rivas
I.
Trapped in concentric circles,
blind,
I was circumscribed.
Now I am a wound
pierced from every direction.
There’s such agony in
finally perceiving.
The beauty and multiplicity
is too much for an old man’s eyes.
The world too vast to be encompassed.
I might have said back then
back when
that I was a seer, a seeker
but it was deception.
I spun words in silent motifs
weaved a web around myself
and all the while
the world clamored and rattled.
Blind to the pain I caused I moved on
prophesized vision
when it was
oh it surely was
mostly
deception,
a construction flimsy, paper-thin
crumbling at last
scattered like confetti
strewn about
waiting for a gust of wind.
II.
Time gnaws away at what connects us
cuts us free
so we finally slilp our moorings.
Memory is this thread that will not hold
but only tug at the aching flesh
snapshots and flickers
of a long voyage.
Out beyond all reach
is a limitless ocean
unknown expanse.
We vow to journey together
but we end up alone:
as we’re born so we die.
There is no rhythm and no cadence here
nor am I much concerned for what
may be extracted,
meaning, significance, connection,
just mirages for the traveler.
III.
Letting go to drift in the empty void
looking for nothing that will anchor me
I have come this far
and know not where I’m heading.
Living and dying
two facets of the same geometry
no enlistment of higher mathematics
will yield a more generous answer,
no prayer or deity
will offer rescue or consolation.
As language is bound by grammar
so is biology bound by time
framing it inescapably
stitching us into the continuous weave
of a cellular pattern
a biospheric mesh
we can never fully see,
much less
understand.
Numbers Tell The Story
By Fernando Rivas
Despite new BOP director Collette Peters report to the congressional BOP Oversight
Committee in late September which speaks glowingly of the First Step Act as a
means of reducing federal inmate population through ‘intensive’ programming
the real numbers just don’t bear out any such trend.
Let’s look at the bottom line:
On July of 2019, pre-pandemic, the total BOP population was 180,298.
On January of 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, the total was 137,324.
The figures here show that the BOP lost 42,924 inmates during the pandemic,
probably because the courts were no longer actively feeding prisoners into
the system.
Now, on December of 2022, the total population is 159,206. In just about
two years the BOP has managed to intake 21,882 inmates, or half of
the population it lost during the pandemic. At this rate, and all the while
under the supposed population reduction of FSA programs, the BOP will be back to the
same levels as in 2019 within two years.
Just a reminder: the First Step Act was passed on December of 2018.
Another area of contention in Peters’ statement to congress is her argument
that the BOP is under sufficient and competent oversight. She does take note
about the sexual improprieties that took place in the past few years and
does seem to be willing to act to change that issue in the prison culture. But
far more crucial to the welfare of inmates on a daily basis are the medical
deficiencies, the negligence and lack of proper diagnostics and care which have provoked
numerous lawsuits and brought attention from national news media. Both of
these issues are important but the second seems to be glossed over in the
new director’s statement. Peters’ faith in the existing system
of oversight is probably not well founded since all or most of the problems that plague
the BOP took place while such oversight was in place. Changing the director
won’t be the ultimate solution to the problem. The ACA, Region and OIG and other
oversight/inspection systems are composed of previous BOP employees and insiders.
It’s a textbook case of the fox giving other foxes a pass to the henhouse.
Finally, Peters addresses the importance of the issue of respect between
inmates and staff. In the institution where I’m presently ‘housed’ we are
still berated, shouted at like animals and called out to various duties as
‘INMATE’, a patently derrogatory and unnecessary term. When there are
messages and call outs over the PA system the term INMATE is unnecessary.
The guards and staff do not use the PA system to communicate. Any person
called on the PA system is automatically known to be an inmate and using
the term over the PA system is purposefully demeaning, intimidating and
thoroughly meritless. I don’t know if this problem is a system-wide issue but I would
think Peters should have addressed it in her presentation. It seemed to be
a key factor of her reform in the Oregon prison system when she was
the director there. We’d surely welcome it here.
The Contrition Narrative
By Fernando Rivas
Countless prison reform organizations have sprung up over the past three decades.
They are forged and fueled perhaps by our great national angst over our problem
with crime. But is it a problem? Or is it not more of an obsession? While certainly reform is an
admirable endeavor the reality of prison in the U.S. is that it is currently as humane,
as ‘reformed’, as is possible given the underlying philosophy of punishment and
retribution that has spawned it.
Our idea of prison is mired in the same quasi-religious philosophical mud as the
efforts to reform it. Ours is a binary belief system. It’s ‘good’ vs. ‘evil’, white hats
and black, the good Jedi and the ones that have gone to the dark side, God and
Satan. In our communities, our living rooms and in the media we are repeatedly
living out and rehashing iconic archetypal scenarios, biblical conflicts,
that require clear-cut, no-nonsense right and wrong, guilt, shame and in the final
act redemption. There is no room here for gray areas or doubt, no room for
psychology or social science.
Reformers should focus their efforts not on prisons, which are the final
stage on the product line of our social malaise, but on the legislative bodies and on
law enforcement which is where, as they say, the rubber first meets the road.
In our misguided reform system reformers become apologists for those the legal system
has designated as ‘criminal’ (i.e. ‘evil’). Forced into this role reformers become unwilling
and unknowing pawns of the existing cycle. They are led to seek excuses for why
certain offenders are ‘forgivable’ while others are to be reviled and ignored.
What reformers fail to see is the larger reality of how the U.S. has created a for-profit
system that depends completely on this shame and forgiveness cycle. It is inhumane and
bureaucratic, dysfunctional, a dinosaur cobbled together from bits and pieces of religious
dogma, puritanical righteousness, public fear, racism and plain old shaming and
guilt-reflection, all of it glossed over with some high-falutin’ post-Enlightenment jargon.
It is rooted in the historic violence of old English law, of the bloody medieval power plays
between kings and nobles, in the 17th century illusion of democratic government. It
is rooted in myth and prone to dehumanization as in ‘we are a country of laws, presumably
then not a country of flesh-and-blood humans. This myth is strengthened and propagated
by TV shows and media hype, talking heads of all stripes. In this milieu offenders, if they
are to be addressed or listened to by reformers, must adopt a contrition narrative. They must
define themselves as victims of racism or exploitation who lacked education or resources
and ‘fell into’ a criminal life-style, or as grieving, sorrowful and repentant ‘mea culpa’ actors
who have come to ‘realize how their offense has harmed others’ and to recognize ‘the error
of their ways’. These attitudes can be thought of as contrition narratives. They are meant
to shift the focus from the offender as predator to the offender as victim.
Meanwhile the focus on the true predator here, the state, is lost. Laws are passed with little
or no consideration of what social destruction is wreaked on individuals, families and
communities. Prison sentences become longer and longer even when there is no pragmatic
substantiation that such extremes resolve any social issue. Prison populations
expand and ironically, or perhaps inevitably, there is more crime, more violence. Instead
of protecting society the legal system becomes a dissolving and dissociating force
that inspires rage, dissent and ultimately senseless murder.
Reformers need to cast out the ‘bleeding heart’ contrition narrative and directly address
the legislative processes that have fed the senseless behemoth our
legal system has become. We need to get past the fear and ignorance that generate only
hysteria. True reform lies in seeing beyond the stereotypes and archetypal reactions that
have been implanted in us, the easy definitions of right and wrong, to a more just and
fair accounting of our social ills. There is an overwhelming need for a data-driven system,
not one that is driven by false assumptions, by mindless panic, even less by politicians.
Our society is at a crossroads. Our concepts of crime and punishment need to be radically
overhauled. Some difficult reassessments lie ahead. They will not be the result of
contrition narratives, of the enduring shaming cycle that continues to perpetuate
and not correct the present state of our violence-prone society.
Abolition
By Fernando Rivas
It’s interesting to note that this term once used to end slavery is now used in the
context of ending punitive incarceration policies in the U.S. There are definite
parallels. The 13th amendment abolishes all slavery but preserves the right for
prison inmates to be used for various forms of unpaid labor. Slavery in the South
was primarily an economic institution pre Civil War. From it evolved the scourge
of racial discrimination that blossomed in the post-Civil War era and led into
the 20th century’s excesses, Jim Crow, lynchings etc. Now discrimination, social
and economic, is also the result of incarceration. Inmates face serious social
marginalization, losses of rights and privileges after their release, not unlike
what African-Americans faced after Emancipation.
In the U.S. incarceration, long prison sentences, have become a social addiction.
Society seeks to solve every single problem through its courts and prisons. Sex
and drugs are currently the primary drivers of all incarceration in America. Mandatory
minimums and three-strike laws fill institutions with non-violent inmates that
present no danger to society and could be easily and quickly rehabilitated and
released. Prison has become a billion dollar industry paid by a society driven to
extremes by crafty manipulative politicians.
As a means of solving social problems we are learning the hard lesson that prison
is not very effective, that, in fact, it may make matters worse. Long prison sentences
destroy individuals, families and communities and in the end create more social
havoc and damage than the crimes they purportedly defend society from.
Can prison be abolished? Not in the current atmosphere of social disorder, hatefulness
and vindictiveness. It might be that some form of incarceration is impossible to avoid.
Society cannot allow those individuals that are catastrophically violent and destructive
to roam at will. But using prison to wage moral crusades needs to end. Surely
better and more sustainable solutions, a more enlightened view of what we define as
‘criminal’, can be sought. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth cannot continue to
drive and/or define our social processes.
As they currently exist our courts and prisons are a cancer that is slowly devouring
the core of our society. We are headed down a blind alley. What needs to be ‘abolished’
is our blind dependence on legal measures to insure the solidity and survivability of
our communities. Courts and prisons cannot provide the glue that holds us together.
Without a shared sense of humanity we are doomed to constant conflict with each
other. Prison will never replace what we’ve lost. It can only deepen the wounds that
divide us.
Cycle
By Fernando Rivas
We fluctuate
from minute to minute
year to year
from there to here
here to there
mostly unaware
who we are
who we were.
Rise and fall of tides
the ever-spinning cosmos
invisibly ordered orbit of electrons
a constant vibration
surrounding us
within us
the tormented energy of the universe
ever restless,
formless.
We actors on stage perform without a script
Time’s children, awash in light
though time is an accident.
It is possible to think of it all as
timeless
this place, this pulse, our lives
some subtle and shapeless dream
here to there
there to here
to live and die
blossom and wither
to move to no apparent purpose
for no reason human logic can apprehend
Timeless
All yesterdays todays and tomorrows
a singularity beyond our grasp
and what we have called god
in our anguish of errors
is simply some urgent displacement of energy
thrashing and revising itself
a cycle
with no end and no beginning.
Worms
By Fernando Rivas
Words scattered on the floor, alive
scrawled and crawling
scrambling for sense, angling for my attention
wriggling and writhing
worms
words that slither through me
in and out of me
like when I’m dead and in the ground
which is why I’d rather burn
and be ash
scattered in the wind.
All these words point nowhere
My life insubstantial, insufficient, illusive as air.
Noise, this voice
what choice
but to look to the puzzle
the wriggling symbols
that congeal and form at my feet
creating forms
these worms
these words
these sounds I make
dangling them on a hook
bait
for some mythical beast
that refuses to be caught.
Carousel
By Fernando Rivas
While I was moving toward you
You were moving away.
I was opening my heart,
You were closing yours.
In this opposing dance and at a distance
we drifted apart always further,
a widening circle,
me alone behind the walls,
you out there free.
My offense loomed ever larger for you
as time passed.
I became smaller
and mattered less.
My words sought to reach you
your silence shut me out.
All the talk of redemption and healing
once inspiring
now
means nothing to me
not even being free
now
can heal these wounds.
In this den of noise I find only silence.
Music rings false, it’s cadence hollow.
I see now that in reaching for you
I was reaching into emptiness.
Would you have been there if they’d let me out?
Were you ever really there?
All the songs that had you in them, so many,
have become empty shells.
That you have so neatly excised me from your life
is miraculous surgery
performed without anesthetics
with the dull blade
of disdain.
You have cut me loose.
As a sinner I have no defense.
I never had it.
From here, my desolate vantage point,
life out there spins on and on like a carousel
all tinsel and color.
Sidelined, I watch,
prone to occasional nostalgia.
What there is of love
or what there was of it
is nothing but that senseless circular motion
that tinny calliope music, faint and muffled,
those hobby horses rising and falling
to the sad and predictable meter
all of it going nowhere.
Paradise Misplaced
By Fernando Rivas
From pinnacle to debacle
might be a long fall
but possibly short-lived.
Sultry shady satin-smooth Super-Mario-Brothers Satan
can attest to this,
sent down to the Pit
for daring to be top dog material.
“Hu-hu-hubris,” sang the angelic choir,
“Only room for one God up in this bitch!”
(And maybe this angelic choir is like a hip-hop group,
kickin’ it on the club circuit)
But the Pit with all its drawbacks:
sulphur fumes, lakes of everlasting fire, seedy sleazy demons etc.
is not without its attractions,
which is why Milton made Lucifer
the star of the show, top billing,
a five-pointed star pentagram, get it?
“Lu-lu-lucifer, he the man!” is what the demons sing.
(And maybe they are like a late 90s boy band, all
Biebersweet like)
All religion aside,
we are all angels and demons
all of us on this rickety old prison transport
goin’ down the road
like some Johnny Cash tune
headed for the state pen
the state of being bent
the state of staying numb
to the hurt of living.
Lucifer got it right maybe
if you think about it,
trading the smarmy glory of blue heaven
for the sexy slutty burn of hellfire.
The evangelicals quake in their skin to hear that
surely,
while secretly
they give in to all earthly human temptations
and indulge in private where no one sees
but their Cyclopic God who witnesseth all.
And eventually the confessions must come:
pinnacle to debacle,
pulpit to prison,
how the mighty have fallen,
tearful and repentant for the AP wire, the TV newsfeed,
fodder for the TikTok and Instagram crowd.
Yo, Milton, dude…how could we lose Paradise
if we ain’t never found it?
Emitted/Omitted
By Fernando Rivas
Emit time
through brain, bone and breath.
Emit energy, measured, temporal.
A finite ratio
accountable
once emitted
unrecoverable.
Emit time
through stars, planets, meteors
endless galaxies
beyond numbering.
Emission of light:
Emission of breath:
Once completed
equals
an end to luminescence:
dark matter
black holes
transformation to unknown states.
Emitted we are
gradually
omitted
until, giving off the last spark
we, like the universe
will perish,
die, end__
or possibly
transcend
Rec Yard Haiku
By Fernando Rivas
Summer dissolves into fall.
Youth jogging past on the muddy track, fleet-footed,
long-legged, able-bodied, virile.
Leaves me behind, an old man shuffling
lagging, nostalgic.
Pieces of a slaughtered bird, scattered feathers
Strewn on the dewy grass,
Time like a hawk swoops down and pillages
leaving only debris:
What we are made of.
What we once were.
The Buck
By Fernando Rivas
I guess we live in a police state and I forgot.
What’s that old saying?
First they came for the criminals.
Then they came for the vagrants.
Then they came for the undesirables.
Then they came for the minorities.
Etc…
The buck has to stop somewhere. It’s better if the door is
jammed open with an old shoe like me than by someone
who would really be hurt. As far as missing mail we already
get that here and I don’t think it’s intentional. They are short
staffed and don’t have enough mail handlers. One guy just
got a magazine from November of 2020.
The BOP is not very concerned about criticism from inmates.
They will do what they want regardless. BTW Sally is not the
only one with a hair bun. That’s a fashion. It’s impossible to
know who I’m talking about unless you were in the middle of
the situation. And I’m sure situations like this play out over
and over throughout the system. I don’t mention names.
I’m not interested in getting individuals or institutions in
any hot water – I have bigger fish to fry – like the entire
system.
Still I’m Here
By Fernando Rivas
A breath of this Texas sky is all
and I’m glad to be alive
even if not free (even if not).
Golden morning sky
Saharan desert sand blown,
smeared across the wide dawn horizon.
Another summer,
more long months ahead, years
unloved.
Still I’m here
in one piece
like an old tree
rooted in this life (in this).
They let us out
now and then
like dogs
taken for a walk.
They’ve enclosed me
but my spirit roams
these golden morning skies
on wings
and I
breathe.
Renewed,
tears blur my eyes,
thankful:
a breath (one deep breath) of this Texas sky
is
all.
Maya’s Bird
By Fernando Rivas
I would if I could tell Maya Angelou
that her caged bird
no longer sings
it squawks
and struts
in front of a mirror in its enclosure
where it sees only its reflection
a dumb bird
that knows no better.
But Maya’s gone
gone too her world and that avian species
and what’s left to say?
No song. No words.
Today
in the rec yard
they circle
round and round the dirt track,
crow-like grackles,
all of us
in our sorry cages.
It’s a wind-tossed day
that ruffles our wings
another forever day down
no more songs to sing, no poetry
only the squawking
yammering:
a
pointless
enunciation.
EMPTY TIME
By Fernando Rivas
1.
You want me to make sense?
How can I make sense?
Nothing makes any sense.
I’m in deep, inside reverberant social insanity, inequity.
I am the criminal
Null and void.
Prison poetry:
Tripping on
A frisson for those who hunger &
wonder &
stammer:
What is it like?
Would I survive? (those poor bastards, us)
Just being alive, aware.
There’s sense if you enclose it with a fence
like you had to with the Capitol in DC
because that sense
is priviliged, periscopic
as power always is.
But me, here, surrounded by concertina wire
submerged
entombed in concrete
how can I make sense?
Nothing makes any sense.
My senses are cloistered, curtailed
assailed.
I am reduced,
once seduced
now I’m trashed
classified/
rehashed/
smashed/
You – want – me – to – make – sense?
Sense is only alive
while free,
unlike me
left here to marinate
disintegrate
in brutal nonsense
and noise.
2.
Struck, I watch you out there
deconstruct
I watch you flail and fail
I watch your speeches
your patriotic fervor
your forum and decorum, empty gestures
And you ask me to make sense
But how can I make sense
when nothing anywhere (anytime) (anymore) makes sense.
All I truly grasp
is your need
to build a fence
and you have built a fence (many fences)
taller than me and stronger
ever taller, ever longer
And now you want
you
want
me
to
be contrite and make amends?
But, don’t you see, I can’t make sense
when nothing anywhere makes sense,
not inside and not outside
no excuse and no defense,
nowhere to hide
just these lines
and these rhymes
running down
on
empty
time.
Here we live and here we die
behind the fence
beyond all sense.
There is no truth, there is no lie,
there’s no defense, no case to try,
only these poor bastards
these witless clowns
all locked inside
all locked inside.
Never Mind
By Fernando Rivas
All that we hold close and dear
in hope, in lust or fear
will one day disappear
into the dust of time (a fate we deem unkind)
Enthralled by love’s embrace we cling.
Such ecstasy we bring
to songs we rock and sing
libidoed, fooled and blind (how we do shine)
In those fizzy fires of youth
we spin with fevered truth
sometimes naive, sometimes uncouth
we fall and crash and never mind (we learn to fall or walk the line)
By Fernando Rivas
This is the mystery:
that these hands, mine
were once a child’s hands,
smooth.
These eyes
perceived with crystal clarity
a night sky,
stars, sharp as pinpricks.
Once fresh
now jaded,
now spent,
gray.
The mystery,
my story,
all of ours’
all of us, witnesses passing through
here and gone.
The moment of deja vu is strange enough,
but stranger still:
remembering where you were when
you first conjured it:
a dream? a reverie?
That glimpse,
that mystery,
always and never
here and gone.
Amidst The Noise
(A Prison Villanelle)
By Fernando Rivas
I die each day a bit inside
while still I try my best to live
amidst the noise, against the tide.
By these Laws should I abide,
strained and drained as through a sieve?
I die each day a bit inside.
I am assailed, without a guide,
by guilt that pierces like a shiv,
amidst the noise, against the tide.
On wings I wish that I could glide,
far from these sins they won’t forgive.
Each day I die a bit inside.
There’s no escape, Lord knows I’ve tried.
There is no love, no yield, no give,
amidst this noise, against this tide.
You speak of freedom out there, outside
But we know better, here inside:
These pristine walls, so clean and white
are harsh collide of wrong and right.
It’s why I die each day inside
Amidst the noise, against the tide.
Speculation
By Fernando Rivas
To have love.
Can you ‘have’ love?
Or is love
what you feel? (skin-deep or heart-felt)
To feel or have
to need or possess
or to be needed or possessed,
to hunger for and yearn
or to be
just – to be released
feel
have
love
four letter words all
to be empty
to lose
love
love and
hope
four letter sighs
gasps of the soul
oasis of the spirit
to be whole
to be
free.
Is love biology?
Life
is it viral?
Is it a memory
or a
wish?
A life wish
to hope to love
to have
to crave
to need
to hurt.
To fade.
As love will and must fade.
As life will and must fade.
As hope will fade.
As we’ll have nothing
in the end
as we had nothing coming in
not having, not being
not hoping
will we be
at last
free?
In Memory of George Floyd
By Fernando Rivas
I’m remembering
disassembling
what my life in pieces
I can’t breathe
is what he said
I can’t breathe
Comes to an end, crushed.
And what do you have
remembering
disassembling
questioning
I can’t breathe
For too long
for far too long
choking down bile
choking on it
the seething injustice
comes to an end
and what do you have
Been here to long, inside.
Too much of the same
too far in the wrong
this game
They shut the gates on me
they shut the gates
and I can’t breathe and
I can’t breathe
oh momma
and everything hurts and
I just can’t breathe
i
just
can’t
COVID
By Fernando Rivas
The virus that afflicts the planet
the pandemic that infects the soul
the hysteria that reduces us
the simplifications that enclose us
All the voices that comfront us
Feeding fear and great confusion
All an illusion that surrounds us
All an intrusion that may crush us
Come at once and in great numbers
From a thousand images concocted
And a million voices erupting
All the talking heads disrupting
End of times at every moment
Breaking news in every segment
Truth be damned we’re selling Product
Keeping eyes tuned in and waiting
All our specialists commenting
All our maps and graphics trending
All the people we’re surveying
How the virus keeps mutating
Until yes, we’re all infected
yes indeed, contaminated
with a fear of our own making.
Lockdown/Endurance
By Fernando Rivas
At 17,500 MPH astronaut Scott Kelly
orbits
rides the International Space Station.
In lockdown I read his words
Endurance, his book.
Prison, like the space station
is hermetic
inescapable.
What kills an astrounaut is the cold vacuum of space
What kills the inmate are the guns of the perimeter guards.
Kelly says space has the smell of burnt metal.
Prison smells of concrete and sweat
anxiety.
In lockdown during the COVID epidemic
endurance is psychological.
Will the virus get in?
350 men in this space vehicle traveling at 0 MPH.
The virus would feast
on our biology.
On the phone my wife asks, is the virus a sentient being?
It endures, is my reply
mutates
multiplies, hungry to replicate
but knows nothing
cares nothing for our humanity
our sins, our good deeds.
Leaving lockdown
will be like passing through an airlock
into the earth-bound module, to descend
to crash-burn through the atmosphere
no fear
what is outside
but thos lives we left behind?
Like Scott Kelly, enduring, surrounded by technology
not a pilot but a passenger
as are we all, prisoners
here in the lockdown
enduring
orbiting.
Monkey
By Fernando Rivas
Armored silver-plated eggplant launchers
poisoning the dreamscapes
corrugated skateborad wobble wheels
grinding over geologic fissures
seismic plates waiting to shift
writing haikus like poisoned curare darts
for which there is no antidote
see me falling from the high branches
like the Amazon jungle monkey
stung by every which possible
inequity
brought down.
Carbonized caramelized psssion fruit concoctions
cocktail promises for cures to no disease
all the dancers wearing dada outfits
gowns that flutter in the whispery breeze
maybe in Belize
not allow my mind to wander
into deeper darker
please
keep the doctored pictures in the box beneath the workbench
where no one finds the inward sea I swim in each night
‘Doom’ they call me
like the Gameboy
and I find myself wandering off course
as if ever there was any truthful tributary
in the topographic visions of the seabottoms
I’ve been sounding, drowning and never even knew it.
No mythological deity to save me
only lure me
pretty girlies misty-eyed and clean
virginal and sweet
far from prophetic
pathetic
makes you wonder what it all could mean
(if anything).
I escape your worldly pragmatism
and destroy your twisted legalese
brought to my knees
I am the sacrificial monkey
wrested from his nest high in the canopy
to die at your feet
spewing irrational
non-sequitors
purple blood
in ribbons
frothy
sleaze.
Inmates
By Fernando Rivas
We, the discarded
the distorted
the broken
the perverse the excluded the morose
here in the cinderblock palace
making human noises and animal
shout & strut & lurch & laugh & fight
though we are empty
wasted
lost
forgotten fragmented
left to wither and waste
Through television portals
we watch the world unfold
motion and emotion
in which we play no role
In the kingdom of noise
we are ghosts
waiting for an out-date
we say the word mother sister wife daughter
we say father brother friend son
we say
we say
but words here have no substance
and we’re left to drown
in plastic sippy cups of tea and coffee
We are walking talking weight-lifting silence
music in our heads
the lyrics of half-remembered tunes
floating out of reach
time murders our spirit
and if the punished bodies survive
it is unlikely they will house a clean soul
We are dinosaurs
fossils
relics
artifacts
the adverse the deluded the comatose
we are unassembled and disembodied
still we walk on
programmed to survive
to sustain hope
for some unlikely outcome
as yet unforeseen
something different than this
some are lost in the journey
left behind as memory
incomplete and unfinished
those who have broken us
call this
justice
but it is fear and disgust writ large
that locks us all inside
and even the gatekeepers catch the disease
the silence seeping out of these walls
is already beginning to cover the towns and cities
and nothing will hold it back
we are all infected
we are all marked
we are all
inmates.
PRIZM/PRISON (A)
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