FREEDOM IN CAPTIVITY
A Trilogy
Part One: The High Priests of Parity
The High Priests of Parity
Rule with subtle severity
And never get out of the way.
Their grey clouds obscure
Joys that once were
The promise of every new day.
The Prisoners of Parity are not even machines,
Just replaceable parts
Tracked on charts,
Stored in racks,
Shuttled in carts,
Deployed by science
To labor in cubes on repetitive chores
Along silent, endless, grey corridors.
With all equations deemed equal,
All numbers must be zeroes.
They are vaudeville villains,
Moderate madmen and half-hearted heroes
Climbing false peaks and descending false valleys,
Taking arrogant enemies for affirming allies.
The leveling power of abnormality
Reduces them to atoms of functionality.
The High Priests of Parity
See with great clarity
They are superior folk.
Part Two: A Prisoner of Parity Escapes
The body is left where it lies
Until a team comes to take it away.
If there be a soul,
The High Priests of Parity don’t care.
Since operations cannot be paralyzed,
The inactive cube is quickly sterilized
And made ready for a new part
To occupy the chair.
005-X-17 Proud Necromancer
Died at her desk
To no one’s surprise,
Probably from an untreated cancer.
For months she had looked
Partially putrefied.
006-C-44 Black Morning stopped reconciling invoices
Long enough to remember
Her impossible choices
Her bourbon breath
Her undetected theft
Her unreconciled invoices
Her unreconciled relationships
Her unhealed wounds
Her futile healing incantations
Coaxed out of the slime.
You are condemned for passing judgment,
The High Priests of Parity will say
When they read his thoughts today.
But he could not help himself.
He could not help but think
She was much, much better than he.
Part Three: Thin Air
The High Priests of Parity condemned him
To life.
Luckier ones get Suicide City,
But he, for deeming himself unworthy,
Remains in chains serving time
In a cinderblock cell
In a jungle he judges
Adjacent to hell.
He forces down hot, thick,
Reeking, steaming mud
That bubbles into his lungs.
He drifts into his dream
Of a mountain peak and thin air.
Unbroken clouds below him
And blue sky above.
His kingdom of cool thin air.
Crusted blood cakes an ankle
Slowly strangled by an iron ring.
He measures time
By the length of his beard
Hanging now below ribs
Visible beneath the pallid skin
Of his starving frame.
Sounds trickle sometimes pour
Into his ears,
Sounds he can’t make out.
Sounds that sound like words.
The spaces between his toes
Say hello to the welcoming host, the snow.
From the summit he gazes down
On the sprawling tablecloth of clouds.
His lungs feast on thin air, contented,
Unbound.
Voices below signal people approaching,
Familiar but unfamiliar,
Climbing perhaps floating,
Encountering no resistance
From thin air.
The reeking, steaming air is everywhere,
Pressing into him from all sides.
What keeps me standing, he thinks.
His beard sweeps the dirt floor
Along with the rust and the dust
That once was an iron ring.
He staggers into a steaming chaos
Of towering trees and winding vines
And thorns that shred what’s left of his skin
As he makes his slow-motion escape.
The guards are long dead.
The sounds like words grow louder.
His bare and broken feet melt like wax into the bubbling ground.
He clears more vines with the sticks of his arms,
Hoping for a last-minute glimpse of thin air.
He falls on all fours,
Lungs begging for peace.
The sounds like words embrace him.
At last he makes one out,
A word that answers his prayer.
And with that he vanishes
Into thin air.
