Trapped

When Jimmy Cliff sang “Trapped” I had never been

enough in love to wear chains, to give away

the three or four things I do well for the sake

of someone else’s slim measure: I mean joy

as a feather on the scales, the weight of a cape

slipping off the shoulders. But whose cape?

This is when Dean would run for the river banging

a pan with a pistol and fingering the right wrist

for a pulse or a tattoo of Singapore, the whole city

on his forearm, though neither of us cared for

the blue aleph of “everyness” those years between stations.

And Dean would never say Borges while I

can’t seem to stop dropping names.

“I will teach my eyes to see beyond these walls

in front of me,” though even the metaphor

in the metaphysics is a sort of loofah on a stick,

a sponge I could have eaten had I been there

at the harvest. It wasn’t Dean nor was it David

who worried metaphor was simply evasion,

though here I go, as far from chains as a retired jailer.

Clemency has nothing to do with guilt or, as it

turns out, innocence. But I’m sick of mercy.

Or maybe just tired of it, tired of asking at the end

of the day for the quiet inside a seashell, which is

to say for music as it simmers down. And there it is:

from Jimmy Cliff to Bob Marley in a phrase.

What better way to slip away, to break away,

to end away from where I started: trapped.